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Book 

Copyright N°_ 



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BOOKS BY ARTHUR RUHL 

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI. A Year of 
War on Many Fronts — and Behind Them. 
Illustrated. 12nio net $1.50 

SECOND NIGHTS: People and Ideas of the 

Theatre To-Day. 12mo . ... net $1.50 

THE OTHER AMERICANS. Illustrated. 

12mo net $2.00 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 




The Turkish base at Ak-bash, on the Sea of Marmora, north of the 

Dardanelles. 

The aeroplane bomb described on page 228 fell in the middle distance beyond 

the camel-train. The beach is to the right, just outside the picture. 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

A YEAR OF WAR 
ON MANY FRONTS— AND BEHIND THEM 



BY 

Pi 

ARTHUR RUHL 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1916 






Copyright, 1916, bt 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published March, 1916 




MAR 29 1916 

©CLA428305 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. "The Germans Are Coming I" 1 

II. Paris at Bay 16 

III. After the Marne 26 

IV. The Fall of Antwerp 40 

V. Paris Again — and Bordeaux: Journal of a 

Flight from a London Fog 68 

VI. "The Great Days' ' 93 

VII. Two German Prison Camps 118 

VIII. In the German Trenches at La Basse e . . 128 

IX. The Road to Constantinople: Rumania and 

Bulgaria 147 

X. The Adventure of the Fifty Hostages . . 173 

XL With the Turks at the Dardanelles . . . 194 

XII. Soghan-Dere and the Flier of Ak-Bash . 216 

XIII. A War Correspondents' Village 230 

XIV. Cannon Fodder 243 

XV. East of Lemberg: Through Austria-Hungary 

to the Galician Front 264 

XVI. In the Dust of the Russian Retreat . . . 287 

v 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Turkish base at Ak-Bash, on the Sea of Marmora, 

north of the Dardanelles Frontispiece 



FACING PAGB 

London news-stand and news-vender at the time of the 

first German advance 6 ' 



A field in France after the Battle of the Marne .... 28 



v' 



Bursting shells on the outskirts of Antwerp. Smoke from 

burning petrol-tanks in the distance 42 

Belgian peasants fleeing before the German advance . . 42 

The entrance to the palace of King Ferdinand in Sofia . 148 

Bulgarian peasants in the market at Sofia and their water- 
buffalo cattle 148 

A corner of the Galea Vittorei, the main street of the 

Rumania capital 152 

Queen Marie of Rumania — the Queen is a granddaughter 

of Queen Victoria — and little Prince Nicolas . . . 158 " 

Bulgarian peasant children on the road to Samokov, near 

Sofia 166 

Young Bulgarian officers — in summer uniform — in Sofia . 166 " 

Beach and cliffs at Gallipoli with refugees from the bom- 
barded town camped in the shelter of the rocks . . 176^ 
vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

The English hostages at Gallipoli, with their volunteer 
companion, Doctor Wigram, pastor of the Crimean 
Chapel at Constantinople 178' 

The smashed mosque by the waterfront after the bom- 
bardment of the town of Gallipoli 182 " 

The Secretary of the American Embassy and the incom- 
parable Levy at Lapsaki 190 * 

Typical Gallipoli country — Turkish stables screened with 

brush in one of the valleys above Sedd ul Bahr . . 204 ' 

The Turkish division commander, Essad Pasha, at his 
headquarters on the hill above the English position 
atAriBurnu 208 

A group of Turkish officers and an unexploded shell from 
the British battleship, Queen Elizabeth, which fell near 
their camp 210 



• 



Pass issued to Mr. Ruhl, and Mr. Suydam of the "Brooklyn 

Eagle," by Field-Marshal Liman von Sanders . . 212' 

Local Turkish pass used by the author at the front on 

Gallipoli 212' 

Camel supply-train for Turkish troops proceeding along 
the beach close to the narrowest point in the Dar- 
danelles 218 ' 

The village square, Nagybiesce, Hungary, where corre- 
spondents attached to the Austro-Hungarian Presse- 
Quartier lived when not on trips to the front . . . 234 

The author's passport covered with vises. Each vise 

means a frontier crossed 238 

In a hospital garden, Budapest 254 ■ 

viii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACTNG PAGE 



Surgeons, nurses, and wounded Russian prisoner in the 

Kaiserin Augusta Barrack Hospital, Budapest . . 260' 

A convalescent Austro-Hungarian soldier at the Kaiserin 
Augusta Hospital, Budapest, receiving a visit from 
his parents and little brothers 260 

Where the Austro-Hungarians forced a passage of the Bug 

River at Kamionka 276 

Russian prisoners working in a Galician wheat-field near 

Lemberg 278 

A German column advancing along the road to Brest- 
Litovsk. Peasant refugees returning, in the opposite 
direction, to their homes 288 



IX 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING !" 

The Germans had already entered Brussels, their 
scouts were reported on the outskirts of Ghent; a 
little farther now, over behind the horizon wind- 
mills, and we might at any moment come on them. 

For more than a fortnight we had been hurrying 
eastward, hearing, through cable despatches and wire- 
less, the far-off thunder of that vast gray tide rumbling 
down to France. The first news had come drifting in, 
four thousand miles away, to the little Wisconsin lake 
where I was fishing. A strange herd of us, all drawn in 
one way or another by the war, had caught the first 
American ship, the old St. Paul, and, with decks 
crowded with trunks and mail-bags- from half a dozen 
ships, steamed eastward on the all but empty ocean. 
There were reservists hurrying to the colors, corre- 
spondents, men going to rescue wives and sisters. 
Some were hit through their pocketbooks, some through 
their imaginations — like the young women hoping to 
be Red Cross nurses, or to help in some way, they 
weren't sure how. 

One had a steamer chair next mine — a pale, Broad- 
way tomboy sort of girl in a boyish sailor suit, who 
looked as if she needed sleep. Without exactly being 
on the stage, she yet appeared to live on the fringe 

1 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

of it, and combined the slangy freedoms of a chorus 
girl with a certain quick wisdom and hard sense. It 
was she who discovered a steerage passenger, on the 
Liverpool dock, who had lost his wife and was bring- 
ing his four little children back to Ireland from Chicago, 
and, while the other cabin passengers fumed over their 
luggage, took up a collection for him then and there. 

"Listen here!" she would say, grabbing my arm. 
"I want to tell you something. I'm going to see this 
thing — d'you know what I mean? — for what it'll do 
to me — you know — for its effect on my mind ! I 
didn't say anything about it to anybody — they'd 
only laugh at me — d'you know what I mean? They 
don't think I've got any serious side to me. Now, 
I don't mind' things — I mean blood — you know — they 
don't affect me, and I've read about nursing — I've 
prepared for this ! Now, I don't know how to go about 
it, but it seems to me that a woman who can — you 
know — go right with 'em — jolly 'em along — might be 
just what they'd want — d'you know what I mean?" 

One Russian had said good-by to a friend at the 
dock, he to try to get through this way, the other by 
the Pacific and Trans-Siberian. The Englishman who 
shared my stateroom was an advertising man. "I've 
got contracts worth fifty thousand pounds," he said, 
"and I don't suppose they're worth the paper they're 
written on." There were several Belgians and a 
quartet of young Frenchmen who played cards every 
night and gravely drank bottle after bottle of cham- 
pagne to the glory of France. 

2 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

Even the Balkans were with us, in the shape of a 
tall, soldier-like Bulgarian with a heavy mustache 
and the eyes of a kindly and highly intelligent hawk. 
He was going back home — "to fight ?" "Yes, to 
fight." "With Servia?" asked some one politely, 
with the usual vague American notion of the Balkan 
states. The Bulgarian's eyes shone curiously. 

"You have a sense of humor !" he said. 

This man had done newspaper work in Russia and 
America, studied at Harvard, and he talked about our 
politics, theatres, universities, society generally. It 
was a pity, he said, and the result of the comparative 
lack of critical spirit in America that Mr. Roosevelt 
had been a hero so long. There were party papers 
mechanically printing their praise or blame — "and 
then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the 
Springfield Republican" — but no general intelligent 
criticism of ideas for a popular idol to meet and an- 
swer. "On the whole, he's a good influence — but in 
place of something better. It isn't good for a man to 
stand so long in the bright sunshine." 

That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work 
out their own salvation he doubted. "I think of 
Bulgaria — surely our inheritance of Turkish rule was 
almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, 
and of the intensive culture we had at a time when 
we were only a name to most western Europeans." 

He was but one of those new potentialities which 
every whisper from the now cloud- wrapped Continent 
seemed to be opening — this tall, scholar-fighter from 

3 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw placed his 
chocolate soldiers. 

In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in 
a white polo coat looked nervously out on the sea. 
She was Irish and came of a fighting line — father, 
uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband 
in command of a British cruiser, scouting the very 
steamship lane through which we were steaming. 

Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit — a fighter 
born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to 
prick any balloon in sight. She had chased about the 
world too long after a fighting family to care much 
about settling down now. They couldn't afford to 
keep a place in England and live somewhere else half 
the time — "and, after all, what is there in being a 
cabbage?" She talked little. "You can learn more 
about people merely watching them," and she lay in 
her steamer chair and watched. 

She could tell, merely by looking at them in their 
civilian's clothes, which were army and which navy 
men, which "R.N.s" and which merchant-service 
men. We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India 
artillery regiment. "Yes — ' garrison-gunner/ " she 
said. She was sorry for the German people, but the 
Kaiser was "quite off his rocker and had to be 
licked." 

War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to 
Mersey Bar, and an officer in khaki bellowed from the 
pilot-boat: "Take down your wireless!" Down it 
came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while 

4 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

the passengers crowded about a volunteer town- 
crier who read from the papers that had come aboard, 
and, in the strange quiet that descends on an an- 
chored steamship, asked each other how true it was 
that the German military bubble — a magazine article 
with that title had been much read on the way over — 
had burst. 

Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past 
a rusty tramp outward bound, crowded with khaki- 
clad men. All the shipping was tooting as she swept 
by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at 
the land they might never come back to. The reg- 
ular landing-stages were taken by transports, tracks 
were held for troop-trains, and it was night before we 
got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed 
along as usual and barytone soloists in every music- 
hall were roaring defiance to the Kaiser and reiterating 
that Britannia ruled the waves. 

Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an 
army of Englishmen had vanished, none knew where. 
Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I crossed 
the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, 
a newsboy pushed an extra into the cab window — the 
Germans were entering Brussels ! Yet we fought into 
the boat train just as if thousands of people weren't 
fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to 
reach. 

There were two business men in our coupe going to 
France, an elderly Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, 
with black goggles and umbrella, hoping to get through 

5 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright, sweet- 
faced little Englishwoman, in nurse's dark-blue uni- 
form and bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her 
sister's convent had been turned into a hospital. She 
told about her little east-coast town as we crossed the 
sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great 
empty station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, 
found a few cars getting away, so to speak, of their 
own accord. 

The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly 
past; then Bruges, with a wounded soldier leaning on 
the shoulders of two companions; then Ghent. There 
was a great crowd about the station — men thrown out 
of work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes — the 
town just recovering from the panic of that afternoon. 
Flags had been hauled down — the American consul 
was even asked if he didn't think it would be safer to 
take down his flag — some of the civic guards, fearing 
they would be shot on sight if the Germans saw them 
in uniform, tore off their coats and threw them in the 
canal. Others threw in cartridges, thousands of 
gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and 
everybody watched the church tower for the red 
flag which would signal that firing was about to be- 
gin. Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested 
stoutly because its mail edition had been refused at 
the station: 

It is not alone on the field of battle that one must be brave. 
For us civilians real courage consists in doing our ordinary 
duty up to the last. In Limburg postmen made their rounds 

6 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

while Prussians inundated the region, and peasants went right 
along with their sowing while down the road troops were falling 
back from the firing-line. 

Let us think of our sons sleeping forever down there in the 
trenches of Haelen and Tirlemont and Aerschot; of those 
brave artillerymen who, for twenty days, have been waiting 
in the forts at Liege the help so many times promised from the 
allies; of our lancers charging into mitrailleuse-fire as if they 
were in a tournament; let us remember that our heroic little 
infantrymen, crouched behind a hedge or in a trench, keeping 
up their fire for ten hours running until their ammunition was 
exhausted, and forced at last to retire, wounded and worn out, 
without a chief to take orders from, have had no other thought 
than that of finding some burgomaster or commissioner of 
police, in order not to be taken for deserters. 

Let us think a little of all these brave men and be worthy 
of them. 

There were no music-halls in Belgium and there 
were posters on the blank walls, even of little villages, 
reminding bands and hurdy-gurdy players and the 
proprietors of dance-halls that this was no time for 
unnecessary noise. There were no soldiers going gayly 
off to war; the Belgians were coming back from war. 
They had been asked to hold out for three days, 
and they had held for three weeks. All their little 
country was a battle-field, and Belgium open to the 
invader. 

It was too late to get to Brussels, but there was 
still a train to Antwerp. At Puers soldiers were 
digging trenches and stringing approaches with barbed 
wire. The dikes had been opened and part of the 
country flooded. Farther on we passed the Ant- 

7 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

werp forts, then comely suburbs where houses had 
been torn down and acres of trees and shrubs — 
precious, as may be imagined, to a people who line 
their country roads with elms and lindens like avenues 
in parks, and build monuments to benevolent-looking 
old horticulturists — chopped down and burned. And 
so, presently, into the old city itself, dull-flaming 
with the scarlet, gold, and black of the Belgian flag, 
and with something that seemed to radiate from the 
life itself of this hearty, happy people, after all their 
centuries of trade and war, and good food, and good 
art — like their own Rubenses and Van Dycks. 

There was no business, not a ship moving in the 
Scheldt. All who worked at all were helping prepare 
for the possible siege; those who didn't crowded the 
sidewalk cafes, listening to tales from the front, 
guessing by the aid of maps whither, across the 
silent, screened southwest, the German avalanche was 
spreading. 

"Treason," "betrayal," "savagery," were on every- 
body's lips. For Antwerp, you might say, had been 
"half German"; many of its rich and influential men 
were of German origin, although they had lived in 
Belgium for years. And now the Belgians felt they 
had lived there as spies, and the seizure of Belgium 
was an act long and carefully planned. One was told 
of the finding of rifles in German cellars, marked 
"Preserves," of German consuls authorized to give 
prizes for the most complete inventories of their 
neighborhoods turned in by amateur spies. 

8 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

Speaking to one man about the Rubens "Descent 
from the Cross" still hanging in the cathedral, I sug- 
gested that such a place was safe from bombardment. 
He looked up at the lace-like old tower, whose chimes, 
jangling down through leaping shafts and jets of 
Gothic stone, have so long been Antwerp's voice. 
"They wouldn't stop a minute," he said. 

All eastern Belgium was cut off. Brussels, to which 
people run over for dinner and the theatre, might 
have been in China. Meanwhile Antwerp seemed 
safe for the time and I returned to Ghent, got a train 
next day as far south as Deynze, where the owner 
of a two-wheeled Belgian cart was induced to take 
me another thirty kilometres on down to Courtrai. 
It was rumored that there had been a battle at Cour- 
trai — it was, at any rate, close to the border and the 
German right wing and in the general line of their 
advance. 

We rattled along the hard highroad, paved with 
Belgian blocks, with a well-pounded dirt path at the 
side for bicycles, between almost uninterrupted rows 
of low houses and tiny fields in which men and women 
both were working. Other carts like ours passed by, 
occasional heavy wagons drawn by one of the hand- 
some Belgian draft-horses, and now and then a small 
loaded cart, owner perched on top, zipping along be- 
hind a jolly Belgian work dog — pulling as if his soul 
depended on it and apparently having the time of his 
life. Every one was busy, not a foot of ground 
wasted; a more incongruous place into which to force 

9 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

the waste and lawlessness of war it would be hard to 
imagine. 

Past an old chateau, with its lake and pheasant- 
preserve; along the River Lys, with its miles of flax, 
soaked in this peculiarly potent water, now drying in 
countless little cones, like the tents of some vast Lilli- 
putian army, and so at last into Courtrai. 

It was like hundreds of other quaint old towns 
along the French and Flemish border, not yet raked 
by war, but motionless, with workmen idle, young 
men gone to the front, and nothing for people to do 
but exchange rumors and wait for the clash to come. 
I strolled round the old square and through some of 
the winding streets. One window was filled with tri- 
color sashes carrying the phrase: "Long live our dear 
Belgium ! May God preserve her !" 

On blank walls was this proclamation in parallel 
columns of French and Flemish: 



Ville de Courtrai 


Stad Kortrijk 


Avis Important 


Belangrijk Bericht 


A la Population Cour- 


Aan de Kortrijksche 


TRAISIENNE 


Bevolking 



I am about to make an appeal to your reason and your senti- 
ments of humanity. 

If, in the course of the unjust war which we are now enduring, it 
happens that French or Belgian troops bring German prisoners 
to our city, I beseech you to maintain your calm and dignity. 

These prisoners, wounded or not, I shall take under my pro- 

10 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

tection, because I say that they are not really to blame for acts 
which they have been ordered to do under threat of cruel punish- 
ment. 

Yes, I say I shall take them under my protection because my 
heart bleeds to think that they, too, have left behind those dear to 
them — an aged father, an old mother, a wife, children, sisters, or 
sweethearts whom separation has plunged into deepest anguish. 

Do not forget when you see these prisoners passing by, I beg of 
you, and permit yourself to shout at and insult them. Keep, on 
the contrary, the respectful silence appropriate to thinking men. 

Fellow citizens, if, in these grave and painful circumstances, 
you will listen to my advice, if you will recall that it is now thirty 
years that I have been your burgomaster and during all that time 
of hard work I have never asked a favor of you, I feel sure that you 
will obey my request and, on your side, you may be sure that my 
gratitude will not be wanting. 

A. Reynaert, Burgomaster. 

Although war had not touched Courtrai as yet, 
the rumor of it, more terrifying often than the thing 
itself, had swept through all Flanders. Along the 
level highways leading into Courtrai trooped whole 
families carrying babies and what few household 
things they could fling together in blankets. Covered 
wagons overflowed with men, women, and children. 
The speed with which rumor spread was incredible. 
In one village a group of half-drunken men, who in- 
sisted on jeering the Germans were put at the head of 
a column and compelled to march several miles before 
they were released. The word at once ran the length 
of dozens of highroads that the Germans "were taking 
with them every one between fifteen and fifty." I 
heard the same warning repeated on several of the 

11 



\ 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

roads about Courtrai by men and women, panting, 
red-faced, stumbling blindly on from they knew not 
what. Later, I met the same people, straggling back 
to their villages, good-naturedly accepting the jibes of 
those who had stayed behind. 

A linen manufacturer who lived in the village of 
Deerlyck, not far from Courtrai, where German 
scouts had been reported, kindly asked me to come 
out and spend the night. For several miles we drove 
through the densely populated countryside, past 
rows of houses whose occupants all seemed to know 
him. 

Women ran out to stop him and rattled away in 
Flemish; there were excited knots of people every few 
steps, and the heads kept turning this way and that, 
as if we were all likely to be shot any minute. We 
drove into the courtyard of the solid old Flemish 
house — a house in which he and his father before him 
had lived, with tiny rooms full of old paintings, gar- 
den, stable, and hothouse packed close in the saving 
Belgian fashion, and all as spick and span and shining 
as if built yesterday — and then into the street again. 
It was interesting to watch this square little man roll 
sturdily along, throwing out his stout arms impa- 
tiently and flinging at the nervous villagers — who 
treated him almost as a sort of feudal lord — guttural 
Flemish commands to keep cool and not make fools 
of themselves. 

All at once, coming out of nowhere, a wave of panic 
swept down the street like a squall across a still pond. 

12 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

"Bing — Bang!" went wooden shutters over windows, 
the stout housewives flinging the bars home and 
gathering up their children. Doors slammed, windows 
closed — it was like something in a play — and almost 
as soon as it takes to tell it there was not a head, not 
a sound; the low houses were one blank wall, and we 
stood in the street alone. 

Just such scenes as this people must have known 
in the days when Europe was a general battle-ground 
— when the French or the Spanish came into Flanders; 
just such villages, just such housewives slamming 
shutters close — you can see them now in old Flemish 
pictures. 

Slowly doors and windows opened, heads poked 
out. The little street filled, the knots of people gathered 
again. We walked up and down, the linen merchant 
flinging out his arms and his reassurances more and 
more vigorously. Half an hour passed, and then, all 
at once, it came again. And this time it was real. 
The Germans were coming ! 

Down the straight, paved highway, a mile or so 
away, at the farther end of an avenue of elms which 
framed them like a tunnel, was a band of horsemen. 
They were coming at an easy trot, half a dozen in 
single file on either side of the road. We could see 
their lances, held rakishly upstanding across the 
saddle, then the tail of the near horse whisking to 
and fro. One, crossing over, was outlined against the 
sky, and those who could see whispered: "One is 
standing sidewise!" as if this were somehow im- 

13 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

portant. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the women 
huddled inside the door before which we stood. 

Coming nearer and nearer up that long tunnel of 
trees, like one of those unescapable things seen in 
dreams, the little gray spot of moving figures grew 
to strange proportions — "the Germans!" — front of 
that frightful avalanche. A few hundred yards away 
they pulled down to a walk, and slowly, peering 
sharply out from under their helmets, entered the 
silent street. Another moment and the leader was 
alongside, and we found ourselves looking up at a 
boy, not more than twenty he seemed, with blue eyes 
and a clean-cut, gentle face. He passed without a 
look or word, but behind him a young officer, soldier- 
like and smart in the Prussian fashion, with a half- 
opened map in his hand, asked the way to a near-by 
village. He took the linen merchant's direction with- 
out pausing and the horses swung down the side 
street. "Do you speak English?" he called back, as 
if, in happier times, we might have been friends, and, 
without waiting for an answer, trotted on into the 
growing dusk. 

They were but one of hundreds of such squads of 
light cavalry — uhlans for the most part — ranging all 
over western Belgium as far as Ostend, a dozen or so 
men in hostile country, prepared to be cut to pieces 
if they found the enemy they were looking for, or to 
be caught from ambush at any time by some squad 
of civic guards. But as one watched them disappear 
down their long road to France they grew into some- 

14 



"THE GERMANS ARE COMING!" 

thing more than that. And in the twilight of the 
quiet countryside these stern shapes that rode on 
without turning, lances upstanding from tired shoul- 
ders, became strange, grotesque, pathetic — again the 
Germans, legions of the War Lord, come too late into 
a world which must crush them at last, Knights of 
the Frightful Adventure, riding to their death. 



15 



. II 

PARIS AT BAY 

The Calais and Boulogne routes were already closed. 
Dieppe and Havre might at any moment follow. You 
must go now, people said in London, if you want to 
get there at all. 

And yet the boat was crowded as it left Folkstone. 
In bright afternoon sunshine we hurried over the 
Channel, empty of any sign of war, unless war showed 
in its very emptiness. Next to me sat a young French- 
man, different from those we had met before hurrying 
home to fight. Good-looking, tall, and rather languid 
in manner, he spoke English with an English accent, 
and you would have taken him for an Englishman. 
A big canvas bag full of golf-clubs leaned against the 
wall behind him, and he had been trying to play golf 
at one of the east-coast seaside places in England. 
But one couldn't play in a time like this, and the 
young man sighed and waved his hands rather des- 
perately — one couldn't settle down to anything. So 
he was going home. To fight ? — I suggested. Possibly, 
he said — the army had refused him several years ago 
— maybe they would take him now. Very politely, in 
his quiet manner, he asked me down to tea. When 
he stood by the rail watching the tawny French cliffs 
draw nearer, one noticed a certain weary droop to 

16 



PARIS AT BAY 

his shoulders, in contrast to his well-tanned, rather 
athletic-looking, face — born a little tired, perhaps, like 
the young nobleman in Bernstein's " Whirlwind." 
His baggage was addressed to a Norman chateau. 

On the other side was a pink-cheeked boy of seven- 
teen, all French, though he spoke English and divided 
his time between writing post-cards to the boys he 
had been visiting in England and reading General von 
Bernhardi. "The first chapter, 'The Right to Make 
War/ " he said, "I understand that — yes! But the 
second chapter — 'The Duty to Make War' " — he 
laughed and shook his head. "No — no — no!" He 
was the son of an insurance agent who was already 
at the front, and, although under age, he hoped to 
enlist. We drew nearer Dieppe — tall French houses 
leaning inward with tricolors in the windows, a quay 
with the baggy red breeches of French soldiers show- 
ing here and there — just such a scene as they paint 
on theatre curtains at home. A smoky tug whistled 
uproariously, there was a patter of wooden shoes as 
children clattered along the stone jetty, and from 
all over the crowd that had come down to greet us 
came brave shouts of "Eep-eep Hoorah! Eep-eep 
Hoorah!" 

No news, or at least no reliable news. A lot of 
wounded had been brought in, business was stopped, 
the great beach deserted; some thought the Germans 
would be in Dieppe in a day or two. Our train was 
supposed to start as soon as the boat arrived and 
reach Paris before ten that night. It was after dark 

17 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

before we got away and another day before we crawled 
into St. Lazare. 

There was a wild rush for places as soon as the 
gates opened; one took what one could, and nine of 
us, including three little children, were glad enough 
to crowd into a third-class compartment. Two ladies, 
with the three little children, were hurrying away 
from the battle that their husbands thought was going 
to be fought near Dieppe within a day or two. From 
Paris they hoped to get to the south of France. Over 
and over again the husbands said good-by, then the 
guards whistled for the last time. 

"Albaire!" . . . and a boy of about six went to 
the door of the compartment to receive his father's 
embrace. " Don't let the Germans get you!" cried 
the father, with a great air of gayety, and kissed the 
boy again and again. He returned to his corner, 
rubbed his fists into his eyes, and the tears rolled out 
under them. Then the two little girls — twins, it 
seemed, about four years old, in little mushroom hats 
— took their turns, and they put their fists into their 
eyes and cried, and then the two mothers began to 
cry, and the men, dabbing their eyes and puffing 
vigorously at their cigars, cried good-by over and 
over, and so at last we moved out of the station. 

The long train crept, stopped, backed, crept on 
again. Through the open windows one caught glimpses 
of rows of poplar-trees and the countryside lying cool 
and white in the moonlight. Then came stations 
with sentries, stray soldiers hunting for a place to 

18 



PARIS AT BAY 

squeeze in, and now and then empty troop-trains 
jolted by, smelling of horses. In the confusion at 
Dieppe we had had no time to get anything to eat, 
and several hours went by before, at a station lunch- 
room, already supposed to be closed, I got part of a 
loaf of bread. One of the young mothers brought out 
a bit of chocolate, the other a bottle of wine, and so 
we had supper — a souper de luxe, as one of them 
laughed — all, by this time, old friends. 

Eleven o' clock — midnight — the gas, intended for a 
short journey, grew dimmer and dimmer, presently 
flickered out. We were in darkness — all the train 
was in darkness — we were alone in France, wrapped 
in war and moonlight, half real beings who had been 
adventuring together, not for hours, but for years. 
The dim figure on the left sighed, tried one position 
and another uneasily, and suddenly said that if it 
would not derange monsieur too much, she would try 
to sleep on his shoulder. It would not derange mon- 
sieur in the least. On the contrary. . . . 

"You must make yourself at home in France/' 
laughed the mother of the two little girls. But the 
other was even more polite. 

"Nous sommes en Amerique!" she murmured. 

The train jolted slowly on. An hour or two after 
midnight it stopped and a strange figure in turban 
and white robe peered in. "Complet! Complet!' 1 
cried the lady with the little girls. But the figure 
kept staring in, and, turning, chattered to others like 
him. There was a crowd of them, men from France's 

19 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had 
been working in the French mines and were now going 
back to take the places of trained soldiers — the dare- 
devil "Turcos" — sent north to fight the Germans. 

They did not get into our compartment, but into 
the one next to it, and as there was no place to sit 
down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and after a time 
gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the 
floor. They talked broken French or Italian or their 
native speech and now and then broke into snatches 
of a wild sort of song. In Paris girls ran into the 
street and threw their arms about the brave "Marocs" 
as they marched by, but the lady with the little girls 
felt that they were a trifle smelly, and, fishing out a 
bottle of scent, she wet a handkerchief with it and 
passed it round. 

The young Frenchman lit a match — three-twenty. 
The little boy, rousing from his corner, suddenly an- 
nounced, apropos of nothing, that the Germans ought 
to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once 
came the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep 
apparently before this, warning him that he must not 
talk like that or the Germans might hear and shoot 
them. We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one be- 
came aware that the gray light was not that of the 
moon. The lady at my left sat upright. "The day 
comes !" she said briskly. It grew lighter. We passed 
sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods — 
the forest of St. Germain. These woods were misty 
blue in the cool autumn morning, there were bivouac 

20 



PARIS AT BAY 

fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside 
these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy 
blue coats with the flaps pinned back. Just such 
soldiers and scenes you have seen in the war pictures 
of Detaille and De Neuville. Bridges, more houses, 
the rectangular grass-covered faces of forts at last; 
just as Paris was getting up for breakfast, into St. 
Lazare station, heaped with trunks and boiling with 
people, Parisians, belated American tourists, refugees 
from northeast villages, going somewhere, anywhere, 
to get away. It was September 2. 

There were miles of closed shops with placards on 
the shutters: "Proprietor and "personnel have been called 
to the colors 11 ; no buses or trams, the few cabs piled 
with the luggage of those trying to get away, almost 
no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk. 
Papers could not be cried aloud on the streets, and 
the only news was the official communique and a word 
about some Servian or Russian victory in some un- 
pronounceable region of the East. 

" France is a history, a life, an idea which has taken 
its place in the world, and the bit of earth from which 
that history, that life, that thought, has radiated, we 
cannot sacrifice without sealing the stone of the tomb 
over ourselves and our children and the generations 
to follow us." Thus George Clemenceau was writing 
in UHomme Libre, and people knew that this was 
true. And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris, broken 
only by the constant flight of military automobiles, 
screaming through the streets on missions nobody 

21 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

understood, those left behind did not even know where 
the enemy was, where the defenders were, or what 
was being done to save Paris. And it gradually, and 
not unnaturally, seemed to the more nervous that 
nothing had been done — the forts were paper, the 
government faithless, revolution imminent — one heard 
the wildest things. 

Late that afternoon I walked down from the Made- 
leine toward the river. It was the "hour of the aperi- 
tif" — there were still enough people to fill cafe tables 
— and since Sunday it had been the hour of the Ger- 
man aeroplane. It had come that afternoon, dropped 
a few bombs — "quelques ordures" — and sailed away 
to return next day at the same hour. "You have 
remarked/ ' explained one of the papers, "that people 
who are without wit always repeat their jokes." And 
just as I came into the Place de la Concorde, "Mr. 
Taube" came up out of the north. 

You must imagine that vast open space, with the 
bridge and river and Invalides behind it, and beyond 
the light traceiy of the Eiffel Tower, covered with 
little specks of people, all looking upward. Back 
along the boulevards, on roofs on both banks, all 
Paris, in fact, was similarly staring — "le nez en Voir." 
And straight overhead, so far up that even the mur- 
mur of the motor was unheard, no more than a bird, 
indeed, against the pale sky, "Mr. Taube," circling 
indolently about, picking his moment, plotting our 
death. 

I thought of the shudder of outraged horror that 

22 



PARIS AT BAY 

ran over Antwerp when the first Zeppelin came. It 
seemed the last unnecessary blow to a heroic people 
who had already stood so much. Very different was 
"Mr. TaubeV reception here. He might have been 
a holiday balloon or some particularly fancy piece of 
fireworks. Everywhere people were staring upward, 
looking through their closed fists, through opera- 
glasses. Out of the arcades of the Hotel de Crillon 
one man in a bath-robe and another in a suit of purple 
underclothes came running, to gaze calmly into the 
zenith until the "von" had gone. 

As the little speck drew straight overhead, these 
human specks scattered over the Place de la Concorde 
suddenly realized that they were in the line of fire, 
and scattered just as people run from a sudden, shower. 
This was the most interesting thing — these helpless 
little humans scrambling away like ants or beetles to 
shelter, and that tiny insolent bird sailing slowly far 
overhead. This was a bit of the modern war one 
reads about — it was a picture from some fanciful 
story of Mr. H. G. Wells. They scattered for the 
arcades, and some, quaintly enough, ran under the 
trees in the near-by Champs-Elysees. There was a 
"Bang!" at which everybody shouted "There!" but 
it was not a bomb, only part of the absurd fusillade 
that now began. They were firing from the Eiffel 
Tower, whence they might possibly have hit some- 
thing, and from roofs with ordinary guns and revolvers 
which could not possibly have hit anything at all. 

In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next 

23 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

morning, I wandered through empty streets and 
finally, with some vague notion of looking out, up the 
hill of Montmartre. All Paris lay below, mysterious 
in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of 
something trembling on the verge. One could follow 
the line of the Seine and see the dome of the In- 
valides, but nothing beyond. I went down a little 
way from the summit and, still on the hill, turned 
into the Rue des Abbesses, crowded with vegetable 
carts and thrifty housewives. The gray air was filled 
with their bargaining, with the smell of vegetables 
and fruit, and there, in front of two men playing 
violins, a girl in black, with a white handkerchief 
loosely knotted about her throat, was singing of the 
little Alsatian boy, shot by the Prussians because he 
cried "Vive la France!" and threatened them with his 
wooden gun. 

True or not, it was one of those things that get be- 
lieved. Verses were written about it and pictures 
made of it all over Paris — presently it would be his- 
tory. And this girl, true child of the asphalt, was 
flinging it at them, holding the hearts of these broad- 
faced mothers in the hollow of her hand. 

She would sing one verse, pause, and sell copies of 
the song, then put a hand to her hoarse throat and 
sing again. The music was not sold with the song, 
and it was rather difficult — a mournful sort of recita- 
tive with sudden shifts into marching rhythm — and 
so the people sang the words over and over with her 
until they had almost learned the tune. You can 

24 



PARIS AT BAY 

imagine how a Frenchman — he was a young fellow, 
who lived in a rear tenement over on the other side 
of Montmartre — would write that song. The little 
boy, who was going to "free his brothers back there 
in Alsace" when he grew up, playing soldier 

" Joyeux, il murmur ait : Je suis petit, en somme, 
Mais viendra bien le jour, ou je serai un homme, 
Ardent! Vaillant! ..." 

— the Prussians — monstres odieux — smashing into the 
village, the cry "Maman! MamanV — and after each 
verse a pause, and slowly and lower down, with the 
crowd joining in, " Petit — enfant . . . (" Little boy, close 
your big blue eyes, for the bandits are hideous and 
cruel, and they will kill you if they read your brave 
thoughts") "ferme tes grands yeux bleus" 

The violins mixed with the voices of the market- 
women, crying their artichokes and haricots, and 
above them rang — "Ardent! Vaillant! ..." And it 
might have been the voice of Paris itself, lying down 
there in her mist, Paris of lost Alsace and hopeless 
revanche, of ardor and charm crushed once, as they 
might be again, as the voice of that pale girl in black, 
with her air of coming from lights and cigarette smoke, 
and of these simple mothers rose above the noise of 
the street, half dirge, half battle-cry, while out beyond 
somewhere the little soldiers in red breeches were 
righting, and the fate of France hung in the balance, 
that morning. 

25 



Ill 

AFTER THE MARNE 

At the end of the village the road climbed again from 
the ravine and emerged on open fields. A wall of 
timber, dark and impenetrable as the woods round 
an old chateau, rose at the farther end of these fields 
— the road cutting through it like a tunnel — and on 
the brow of the ravine, commanding the road and the 
little plain, was a line of trenches. Here evidently 
they had fought. 

We walked on down the road. Below the northern 
horizon, where they were fighting now along the Aisne, 
rolled the sullen thunder of artillery, as it had been 
rolling since daylight. And the autumn wind, cold 
with the week of equinoctial rain, puffing out of 
thickets and across ravines, brought, every now and 
then, the horrible odor of death. 

Ahead, to the right, one caught the glint of a French 
infantry's red trousers. A man was lying there, face 
downward, on the field. Then across the open space 
appeared another — and another — they were scattered 
all over that field, bright as the red poppies which 
were growing in the stubble and as still. 

They were in various positions. One lay on his 
back, with one knee raised like a man day-dreaming 

26 



AFTER THE MARNE 

and looking up at the sky. Another was stretched 
stiff, with both hands clinched over his chest. One 
lay in the ditch close beside us, his head jammed into 
the muddy bank just as he had dived there in falling; 
another gripped a cup in one hand and a spoon in the 
other, as if, perhaps, he might have tried to feed him- 
self in the long hours after the battle rolled on and 
left them there. 

All these were French, but just at the edge of the 
thick timber was a heap — one could scarcely say of 
Germans, so utterly did the gray, sodden faces and 
sodden, gray uniforms merge into anonymity. A 
squad of French soldiers appeared at a turn in the 
road. Two officers rode beside them, and they were 
just moving off across the fields carrying shovels in- 
stead of rifles. Looking after them, beyond the belt 
of timber, one could see other parties like theirs on the 
distant slopes to the left, and here and there smoke. 
Two more French soldiers appeared pushing a wheel- 
barrow filled with cast-off arms. With the boyish 
good nature which never seems to desert these little 
men in red and blue, they stopped and offered us a 
few clips of German cartridges. They were burying 
their own men, they said, burning the Germans. The 
dead had been lying here for nearly a fortnight now 
while the battle line rolled northward, clear across 
France. 

We turned back toward Cr6py, passing again 
through the shattered village of Betz. For- three 
days it had been the centre of a battle, the two forces 

27 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

lying outside it and shelling each other across the 
town. The main street, now full of French soldiers, 
was in ruins, the church on the edge of the ravine 
smashed and gaping, and a few peasant women stood 
about, arms folded patiently, telling each other over 
and over again what they had seen. 

Past fields, where the wheat still waited to be stacked 
and thrashed, past the carcasses of horses sprawled 
stiff-legged in the ditch or in the stubble, we tramped 
on to Crepy-en-Valois. The country was empty, 
scoured by the flood that had swept across it, rolled 
back again, and now was thundering, foot by foot, 
farther and farther below the horizon to the north. 
The little hotel across from the railroad station in 
Crepy had kept open through it all. It was the 
typical Hotel de la Gare of these little old towns — a 
bar and coffee-room down-stairs, where the proprietor 
and his wife and daughters served their fleeting guests, 
a few chambers up-stairs, where one slept between 
heavy homespun sheets and under a feather bed. 
They were used to change, and the mere coming of 
armies could not be permitted to derange them. 

Within a fortnight that little coffee-room of theirs 
had been crowded with English soldiers in retreat; 
then with Germans — stern, on edge, sure of being in 
Paris in a few days; then with the same Germans 
falling back, a trifle dismayed but in good order, and 
then the pursuing French. And now they were serv- 
ing the men from the troop-trains that kept pouring 
up toward the Aisne, or those of the wounded who 

28 



AFTER THE MARNE 

could hobble over from the hospital trains that as 
steadily kept pouring down. 

Sometimes they coined money, and, again, when 
the locomotive unexpectedly whistled, saw a roomful 
of noisy men go galloping away, leaving a laugh and 
a few sous behind. Madame would come in from the 
kitchen, raise her arms and sigh something about 
closing their doors, but, after all, they knew they 
should keep right on giving as long as they had any- 
thing to give. One of their daughters, a strapping, 
light-hearted colt of a girl, told us some of the things 
they had seen as she paused in the hall after preparing 
our rooms. Her sister stood beside her, and together 
they declaimed in an inimitable sort of recitative. 

How the English soldiers had come in, all laughing, 
and the young officers so handsome; but the German 
soldiers were all like this — and the young woman gave 
a quick gesture as of one taking nose and mouth in 
her hand and pulling it stiffly down a bit. The French 
officers and their men were like fathers and sons, but 
the Germans had a discipline you would not believe 
— she had seen one officer strike a man with his whip, 
she said, because he was not marching fast enough, 
and another, when a soldier had come too near, had 
kicked him. And they all thought surely they were 
going into Paris — "Two days more," they had laughed 
as they drank down-stairs, "Paris, and then — 
caput!" 

You can imagine that gray horde rolling through 
the streets — narrow, cobblestoned streets, with steep- 

29 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

roofed stone houses and queer little courts, and the 
air over all of having been lived in for generations on 
generations. There is the remnant in Crepy of one of 
the houses that used to belong to the Dukes of Valois, 
and at the end of one winding street you find your- 
self unexpectedly looking through a grilled iron gate- 
way into the ordered stateliness of an old-time 
chateau. On the outward side the walls of the 
chateau garden drop a sheer thirty or forty feet to 
the edge of the ravine. What a place to wait for an 
approaching enemy, one thinks, walking underneath; 
and the Germans evidently thought so too, for from 
this part of town they carefully kept away. They 
burned one house, that of a dressmaker so unfortunate 
as to live next door to a shop in which arms were sold, 
they pillaged the houses whose owners had run away, 
and they ordered the town to pay them one hundred 
thousand francs, but those townspeople who had the 
fortitude to stay behind were not molested. The 
enemy were even polite, one woman told us — "Pas 
jpeur!" said the officer who visited her house, taking 
off his hat. On the gate of another house was scrawled 
in German script, "Sick Woman — keep away I" and as 
we passed the open windows, sure enough there was 
the pale young mother lying propped up in bed just 
as she had been when the Germans came. On another 
door we read, also in German script, "Good people — 
they give everything !" and on several were orders to 
leave those within alone. And there was a curious and 
touching irony in that phrase: "Gute Leute — Schonen!" 

30 



AFTER THE MARNE 

chalked in stiff script by those now fighting for their 
lives to the north of us and likely never to see their 
fatherland again. 

Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the 
towns, whose mayors were dismissed for revealing "a 
lamentable absence of sang-froid/' had a mayor who 
stuck to his post. He was there when three-fourths 
of the village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed 
to receive the German commander, he saw that the 
latter's orders were carried out, and signed the order 
for the town's ransom while his daughter held smelling- 
salts under his nose. 

Whether the mayor of the old town of Senlis, a 
few miles west of Crepy, was in any way tactless is 
scarcely of importance now, in so far as it concerns 
him for he and the other hostages were shot, and, 
however little good it may have done anybody, he 
at least gave France his life. It is said that his order 
to the townspeople to turn in their arms was not com- 
pletely obeyed. It was also said — and this several 
people of Senlis told us — that a few Senegalese, lag- 
ging behind as the French left, fired on the Germans 
as they approached, and that it was possible that one 
or two excited civilians had joined in. 

Granting that civilians did fire after hostages had 
been given, there remains the question of reprisal. 
It was the German commander's idea that Senlis 
should be taught a lesson, and this consisted of shoot- 
ing the mayor and the hostages, and sacking and 
burning the main street — a half mile, perhaps — from 

31 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

end to end. The idea was carried out with thorough- 
ness, and men ran along from house to house feeding 
the flames with petroleum and even burning a hand- 
some new country house which stood apart at one 
end. 

A nice-looking, elderly gentleman whom we met in 
front of the ruined Hotel du Nord said that the Ger- 
mans came there and, finding champagne in the cellar 
after the maitre d'hotel had told them there wasn't 
any, set fire to the hotel, and, as I recall it, shot him. 
How true such stories are I cannot say, but there was 
no doubt that Senlis had been punished. At least 
half of the old city on the banks of the wistful Nonette 
— it is a much larger place than Crepy, with a cathedral 
of some consequence — was smashed as utterly as it 
might have been by a cyclone or an earthquake. The 
systematic manner in which this was done was sug- 
gested by the fact that, in the long street running 
parallel to the one picked for destruction, nearly every 
door still carried its chalked order to "Schonen." 
One house spared was that of a town fireman. "I've 
got five little children/' he told the German soldiers. 
" They're one, two, three, four, five years old, and 
I'm expecting another." And they went on. 

These were common sights and sounds of that gra- 
cious country north of Paris — deserted, perhaps demol- 
ished, villages; the silent countryside, with dead horses, 
bits of broken shell, smashed bicycles or artillery wag- 
ons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind. 

Along the level French roads, under their arches of 

32 



AFTER THE MARNE 

elms or poplars, covered carts on tall wheels, drawn 
by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another, 
and loaded with women, children, and household 
goods, were beginning to move northward as they 
had moved south three weeks before. Trains, similarly 
packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the con- 
stant cannonading, and it was on one of these trains 
that we had come. 

In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three 
weeks before, keen French imaginations were daily 
turning the war into terms of heroism and sacrifice 
and military glory. Even editors and play-writers 
fighting at the front were able to send back impres- 
sions now and then, and these, stripped by the 
censorship of names and dates, became almost as im- 
personal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting com- 
fortably at some cafe table, reading the papers with 
morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming up over 
the Oise and Aisne, heard the French " seventy-fives" 
and the heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; 
saw again, for the hundredth time, some hitherto 
unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one brief 
burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and 
over again, without sight or sound of the concrete facts, 
in that strange, still city whose usual life had stopped, 
produced at last a curious sense of unreality. Meaux 
became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words 
that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads 
that the old guard dies but never surrenders. 

A man could leave the Cafe de la Paix and in two 

33 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

hours be under fire, where killing was as matter of 
fact as driving tacks. And in between these two 
zones — the zone where war was at once a highly or- 
ganized business and a splendid, terrible game, and 
that in which its disjointed, horrible surfaces were 
being turned into abstractions, into ideas, poetry, 
rhetoric — was this middle ground through which we 
were now tramping, where one saw only its silence 
and ruin and desolation. 

We returned to Crepy. All that night the trains 
went clanking through the station, pouring more men 
— Frenchmen, Englishmen — into the sodden trenches 
along the Aisne. For a week it had rained, cold 
shower following cold shower. In Paris shivering 
concierges closed their doors in the middle of the 
day in mournful attempts to keep warm — autumn's 
quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the 
armies had fought across this same country a fort- 
night before. It was into trenches half filled with 
water that the new men were going — Frenchmen 
trundling over to the bar in big overcoats, with their 
air of good little boy, to go galloping back with a 
bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread; English- 
men, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their 
fingers and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for 
their tea. 

There were Highlanders among them, men with 
necks like towers and straight, flat backs and a swing 
of the shoulders — like band music going past. One 
watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of 

34 



AFTER THE MARNE 

pang. What grotesque irony that men like these, 
who in times when war was man's normal business 
might have fought their way through, must now, 
with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering 
the earth, be cut off by a mere wad of unthinking 
lead! 

All that night it rained, and, through the rain and 
dark, trains kept pouring on up into the terrible north. 
Once I heard cattle lowing as their cars clanked past, 
and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night, saw 
the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain 
that had beaten them for days. And just before a 
feeble daylight returned again, the steady rumble of 
artillery. 

After noon there was a break in the clouds, and we 
started on foot for Villers-Cotterets, some fifteen 
kilometres away. The hard macadam road was no 
more than dampened, and ambulances and motor- 
trucks went scooting by as on a city street. Oc- 
casionally there was an abandoned trench, once a 
broken caisson, and the wreck of an aeroplane, but 
the wheat was harvested and stacked. Beyond Vau- 
moise the country grew more hilly, and the caves and 
quarries, which the Germans were making such ef- 
fective use of along the Aisne, began to appear. 

And all this time the cannon were thundering — so 
close that it seemed each hilltop would bring them 
into view, and as the detonation puffed across the 
landscape, one even fancied one could feel the con- 
cussion in one's ear. Up from a field ahead of us an 

35 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

aeroplane rose and, in a wide spiral, went climbing 
up the sky, now almost cleared, and presently disap- 
peared in the north. Then, after satisfying a sentry 
that our papers were correct — such things could be 
done in those first days — we got into Villers-Cotterets. 
Instead of deserted houses we found that nearly every 
house was quartering soldiers. There were infantry- 
men, dragoons, flyers, Senegalese, Algerians, in white 
turbans and burnooses on their desert horses, and every- 
where officers. We had stumbled into a headquarters ! 

With somewhat the sensation of walking a tight 
rope, we sought the mayor to ask for permission to 
stay in town — finally to ask for safe-conducts to Sois- 
sons. The charming old gentleman, undisturbed by 
war's alarms, politely made them out. 

Presently in a hotel full of officers we came on three 
civilians calmly eating dinner. They had arrived by 
train, although there were no trains for civilians; 
they were now dining at a long table set for officers 
from which we had a moment before been turned 
away; and we were rescued by a mysterious being at 
the head of the table — a dark, bald, bright-eyed, 
smiling, sanguine gentleman, who might have been 
an impresario or a press agent, and continually had 
the air of saying, as from time to time he actually 
said: "Ssst! Leave it all to me!" 

He was an American, he said, but spoke vernacular 
French. The other two civilians were a London 
chartered accountant and a Canadian volunteer — a 
young Oxford man — waiting for his regiment. Across 

36 



AFTER THE MARNE 

the table, a big French dragoon, just in from the firing- 
line, his horsetail helmet on the chair beside him, was 
also dining. This man was as different from the little 
infantrymen we had so often seen as the air of that 
town was different from deserted Paris. Just as he 
was, he might have stepped — or ridden, rather — from 
some cavalry charge by Meissonier or Detaille; a 
splendid fellow — head to spurs, all soldier. 

After weeks of newspaper rhetoric and windy civil- 
ian partisanship, it was like water in the desert to 
listen to him — straight talk from a professional fight- 
ing man, modest, level-headed, and, like most fight- 
ing men, as contrasted with those who stay at home 
and write about fighting, ready to give a brave enemy 
his due. The German retirement was not at all a rout. 
When an army is in flight it leaves baggage and equip- 
ment behind, guns in the mud. The Germans had 
left very little; they were falling back in good order. 
Their soldiers were good fighters, especially when 
well led. They might lack the individual initiative 
of Frenchmen, the nervous energy with which French- 
men would keep on fighting after mere bone and 
muscle had had enough, but they had plenty of cour- 
age. Their officers — the dragoon paused. Yesterday, 
he said, they had run into a troop of cavalry. The 
German officer ordered his men to charge, and in- 
stead they wavered and started to fall back. He 
turned on them. "Schweinhunde!" he shouted after 
them, and, flinging his horse about, charged alone, 
straight at the French lances. 

37 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

"Kill him?" asked the man at the head of the 
table. 

The dragoon nodded. "It was a pity. Joli gargon 
he was" — he ran a hand round a weather-beaten cheek 
as if to suggest the other's well-made face — "monocle 
in his eye — and he never let go of it until it fell off — a 
lance through his heart." 

As we talked two secret-service men entered, de- 
manded our papers, examined them, and directed us 
to call at the Mairie for them next morning at eight 
o'clock. Now, indeed, we were walking a tight rope. 
Following the genius who had got us our suppers, 
we emerged into the dark street, walked down it a 
few doors, entered a courtyard full of cavalry horses, 
where men in spurred boots were clanking up and 
down stairs. He thrust a heavy key into a lock, 
opened a door and ushered us into an empty and 
elegantly furnished house. 

Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and 
glasses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over 
the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dress- 
ing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of 
boots just as its owner had left it. Who he might be, 
why we should be here, how our mysterious conductor 
— who knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but 
landed there himself that night — had arranged this 
occupation, was beyond finding out. At the moment, 
with military motor-trucks rumbling past outside, 
soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping 
about in the room overhead — an extension of the 

38 



AFTER THE MARNE 

adjoining house — one scarcely thought of trying to 
find out. One merely accepted it, enchained by that 
uplifted finger and " Leave it to me!" For a time 
we talked under the dining-room light, with doors 
bolted and wooden shutters on street and courtyard 
closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melo- 
drama, and then we slept. 

The Germans were evidently much nearer than 
Paris had supposed, and we should not have been 
greatly surprised to find them in the streets next 
morning. It was an Algerian horseman, however, 
muffled up in his dingy white and looking rather 
chilly, who was riding past the window as I first 
looked out. 

We went to the Mairie — not the grandfatherly old 
mayor this time, but a sharp-eyed special commis- 
sioner of police. 

" After all," said he, when we had put our case, 
"you want to get as near the front as possible." 
True, I answered, we did. 

"Well," he said, with a gesture at once final and 
wholly French, "you are already farther than that. 
You are inside the lines." He crossed out the safe- 
conduct and on the laissez-passer wrote: "Good for 
immediate return to Paris," and carefully set down 
the date. Half an hour later we were well on the 
road to Crepy, with the thunder which had drawn us 
hither rolling fainter and fainter in the north. 



39 



IV 

THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the 
following night was gathering fast when we arrived 
on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks loaded 
with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential im- 
pedimenta screamed through the streets bound away 
from, not toward, the front. The Queen, that after- 
noon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the 
good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked 
their doors and fled. And the cannon, rumbling along 
the eastern horizon as they had rumbled, nearer and 
nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer 
line of forts and within striking distance of the town. 
That night, an hour or two after midnight, in my 
hotel by the water-front, I awoke to the steady 
clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of 
wheels. I went to the window, on the narrow side 
street, black as all streets had been in Antwerp since 
the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs, 
and looked out. It was a moonlight night, clear and 
cold, and there along the Quai St. Michael, at the 
end of the street, was an army in retreat. They were 
Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken 
weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired 

40 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

horses, artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, 
drowsing on their lurching caissons; the patient little 
foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their shoulders, scuf- 
fling along in their heavy overcoats. 

In the dark shadow of the tall old houses a few 
people came out and stood there watching silently, 
and, as one felt, in a sort of despair. All night long 
men were marching by — and in London they were 
still reading that it was but a "demonstration" the 
Germans were engaged in — down the quay and across 
the pontoon bridge — the only way over the Scheldt — 
over to the Tete-de-Flandres and the road to Ghent. 
They were strung along the street next morning, 
boots mud-covered, mud-stained, intrenching shovels 
hanging to their belts, faces unshaven for weeks, just 
as they had come from the trenches; yet still patient 
and cheerful, with that unshakable Flemish good 
cheer. Perhaps, after all, it was not a retreat; they 
might be swinging round to the south and St. Nicholas 
to attack the German flank. . . . 

But before they had crossed, another army, a civil- 
ian army, flowed down on and over the quay. For a 
week people had been leaving Antwerp, now the gen- 
eral flight began. From villages to the east and south- 
east, from the city itself, people came pouring down. 
In wagons drawn by huge Belgian draft-horses, in 
carts pulled by the captivating Belgian work dogs, 
panting mightily and digging their paws into the 
slippery cobbles; on foot, leading little children and 
carrying babies and dolls and canaries and great 

41 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

bundles of clothes and household things wrapped in 
sheets, they surged toward that one narrow bridge 
and the crowded ferry-boats. I saw one old woman, 
gray-haired and tanned like an Indian squaw with 
work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, 
pushing a groaning wheelbarrow. A strap went from 
the handles over her shoulders, and, stopping now 
and then to ask the news, she would slip off this har- 
ness, gossip for a time, then push on again. That 
afternoon under my window there was a tall wagon, 
a sort of hay wagon, in which there were twenty-two 
little tow-headed children, none more than eight or 
ten and several almost babies in arms. By the side 
of the wagon a man, evidently father of some of them, 
stood buttering the end of a huge round loaf of bread 
and cutting off slice after slice, which the older chil- 
dren broke and distributed to the little ones. Two 
cows were tied to the back of the wagon and the 
man's wife squatted there milking them. All along 
the quay and in the streets leading into it were peo- 
ple like this — harmless, helpless, hard-working people, 
going they knew not where. The entrance to the 
bridge was soon choked. One went away and returned 
an hour later and found the same people waiting al- 
most in the same spot, and, with that wonderful 
calm and patience of theirs, feeding their children 
or giving a little of their precious hay to the horses, 
quietly waiting their turn while the cannon which 
had driven them from their homes kept on thunder- 
ing behind them. 

42 




From a photograph topyriylit by Underwood it Underwood 



Bursting shells on the outskirts of Antwerp. Smoke from burning petrol- 
tanks in the distance. 




From a photograph copyright by Underwood & Underivood. 

Belgian peasants fleeing before the German advance. 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 



That afternoon I walked up-town through the 
shuttered, silent streets — silent but for that incessant 
rumbling in the southeast and the occasional honk- 
ing flight of some military automobile — to two of the 
hospitals. In one, a British hospital on the Boule- 
vard L6opold, the doctor in charge was absent for 
the moment, and there was no one to answer my offer 
of occasional help if an outsider could be of use. As 
I sat waiting a tall, brisk Englishwoman, in nurse's 
uniform, came up and asked what I wanted. I told 
her. 

"Oh," she said, and in her crisp, English voice, 
without further ado, "will you help me with a leg?" 

She led the way into her ward, and there we con- 
trived between us to bandage and slip a board and 
pillow under a fractured thigh. Between whispers of 
"Courage! Courage!" to the Belgian soldier, she said 
that she was the wife of a British general and had 
two sons in the army, and a third — "Poor boy!" she 
murmured, more to him than to me — on one of the 
ships in the North Sea. I arranged to come back next 
morning to help with the lifting, and went on to an- 
other hospital in the Rue Nerviens, to find that little 
English lady who crossed with me in the Ostend boat 
in August on the way to her sister's hospital in Ant- 
werp. 

Here in the quiet wards she had been working while 
the Germans swept down on Paris and were rolled 
back again, and while the little nation which she and 
her sister loved so well was being clubbed to its knees. 

43 












ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

Louvain, Liege, Malines, Namur — chapters in all the 
long, pitiless story were lying there in the narrow- 
iron beds. There were men with faces chewed by 
shrapnel, men burned in the explosion of the powder 
magazine at Fort Waelhem, when the attack on Ant- 
werp began — dragged out from the underground pas- 
sage in which the garrison had sought momentary 
refuge and where most of them were killed, burned, 
and blackened. One strong, good-looking young 
fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot 
through the temples and blind in both eyes. It was 
the hour for carrying those well enough to stand it 
out into the court and giving them their afternoon's 
airing and smoke. One had lost an arm, another, a 
whimsical young Belgian, had only the stump of a 
left leg. When we started to lift him back into his 
bed, he said he had a better way than that. So he 
put his arms round my neck and showed me how 
to take him by the back and the well leg. 

"Bon!" he said, and again "Bon!" when I let him 
down, and then, reaching out and patting me on the 
back, "Bon!" he smiled again. 

That night, behind drawn curtains which admitted 
no light to the street, we dined peacefully and well, 
and, except for this unwonted seclusion, just outside 
which were the black streets and still the endless pro- 
cession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one 
might have forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, 
that we were not in times of peace. We even loitered 
over a grate fire before going to bed, and talked in 

44 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

drowsy and almost indifferent fashion of whether it 
was absolutely sure that the Germans were trying to 
take the town. 

It was almost exactly midnight that I found myself 
listening, half awake, to the familiar sound of distant 
cannon. One had come to think of it, almost, as 
nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached 
and not unpleasant interest as a man tucked com- 
fortably in bed follows a roll of thunder to its end or 
listens to the fall of rain. 

It struck me suddenly that there was something 
new about this sound; I sat up in bed to listen, and 
at that instant a far-off, sullen "Boom !" was followed 
by a crash as if lightning had struck a house a little 
way down the street. As I hurried to the window 
there came another far-off detonation, a curious wail- 
ing whistle swept across the sky, and over behind the 
roofs to the left there was another crash. 

One after another they came, at intervals of half 
a minute, or screaming on each other's heels as if 
racing to their goal. And then the crash or, if farther 
away, muffled explosion as another roof toppled in 
or cornice dropped off, as a house made of canvas 
drops to pieces in a play. 

The effect of those unearthly wails, suddenly sing- 
ing in across country in the dead of night from six — 
eight — ten miles away — Heaven knows where — was, 
as the Germans intended it to be, tremendous. It is 
not easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who 
had not lived in that threatened city — the last Bel- 

45 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

gian stronghold — and felt that vast, unseen power 
rolling nearer and nearer. And now, all at once, it 
was here, materialized, demoniacal, a flying death, 
swooping across the dark into your very room. 

It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot 
stir from your tracks, and meanwhile "Boom. . . . 
Tzee-ee-ee-ee /" — is this one meant for you? 

Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and 
people with white bundles on their backs went stum- 
bling by toward the river and the bridge. Motors 
came honking down from the inner streets, and the 
quay, which had begun to clear by this time, was 
again jammed. I threw on some clothes, hurried to 
the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; 
presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, light- 
ing up the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast- 
furnace, and a few moments later there showed over 
the roofs the flames of the first fire. 

Although we could hear the wail of shells flying 
across their wide parabola both into the town and 
out from the first ring of forts, few burst in our part 
of the city that night, and we walked up as far as the 
cathedral without seeing anything but black and 
silent streets. Every one in the hotel was up and 
dressed by this time. Some were for leaving at once; 
one family, piloted by the comfortable Belgian 
servants — far cooler than any one else — went to the 
cellar, some gathered about the grate in the writing- 
room to watch the night out; the rest of us went 
back to bed. 

46 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

There wasn't much sleep for any one that night. 
The bombardment kept on until morning, lulled 
slightly, as if the enemy might be taking breakfast, 
then it continued into the next day. And now the 
city — a busy city of nearly four hundred thousand 
people — emptied itself in earnest. Citizens and sol- 
diers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows, dog- 
carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on 
foot, all flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and 
the bridge. They poured into coal barges, filling the 
yawning black holes as Africans used to fill slave-ships, 
into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading 
down the river and southwestward toward Ostend. 

One thought with a shudder of what would happen 
if the Germans dropped a few of their shells into that 
helpless mob, and it is only fair to remember that 
they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers 
were a part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, 
a mere speck against the blue, was looking calmly 
down overhead. Nor did they touch the cathedral, 
and their agreement not to shell any of the buildings 
previously pointed out on a map delivered to them 
through the American Legation seemed to be observed. 

Down through that mass of fugitives pushed a 
London motor-bus ambulance with several wounded 
British soldiers, one of them sitting upright, support- 
ing with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound 
in a blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away. They 
had come in from the trenches, where their comrades 
were now waiting, with their helpless little rifles, for 

47 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and 
pounded them with his big guns. I asked them how 
things were going, and they said not very well. They 
could only wait until the German aeroplanes had 
given the range and the trenches became too hot, 
then fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same 
game over again. 

Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, 
driven by a Belgian soldier and in charge of a young 
British officer. It was his present duty to motor 
from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the 
London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded. 
It wasn't a particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking 
his head toward the distant firing, and frankly he 
wasn't keen about it. We talked for some time, 
every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that 
morning, and when he started out again I asked him 
to give me a lift to the edge of town. 

Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and 
the deserted streets of the politer part of Antwerp, 
where, the night before, most of the shells had fallen. 
We went crackling over broken glass, past gaping 
cornices and holes in the pavement, five feet across 
and three feet deep, and once passed a house quietly 
burning away with none to so much as watch the 
fire. The city wall, along which are the first line of 
forts, drew near, then the tunnel passing under it, and 
we went through without pausing and on down the 
road to Malines. We were beyond the town now, 
bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, 

48 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

and, clinging there to the running-board with the 
October wind blowing quite through a thin flannel 
suit, it suddenly came over me that things had moved 
very fast in the last five minutes, and that all at once, 
in some unexpected fashion, all that elaborate barrier 
of laissez-passers, sauf -conduits, and so on, had been 
swept aside, and, quite as if it were the most ordinary 
thing in the world, I was spinning out to that almost 
mythical " front." 

Front, indeed ! It was two fronts. There was an 
explosion just behind us, a hideous noise overhead, 
as if the whole zenith had somehow been ripped across 
like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a shell from 
the Belgian fort under which we had just passed went 
hurtling down long aisles of air — farther — farther — 
to end in a faint detonation miles away. 

Out of sight in front of us, there was an answer- 
ing thud, and — " Tzee-ee-ee-er-r-r-Bong !" — a German 
shell had gone over us and burst behind the Belgian 
fort. Under this gigantic antiphony the motor-car 
raced along, curiously small and irrelevant on that 
empty country road. 

We passed great holes freshly made, neatly blown 
out of the macadam, then a dead horse. There were 
plenty of dead horses along the roads in France, but 
they had been so for days. This one's blood was not 
yet dry, and the shell that had torn the great rip in 
its chest must have struck here this morning. 

We turned into the avenue of trees leading up to 
an empty chateau, a field-hospital until a few hours 

49 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

before. Mattresses and bandages littered the de- 
serted room, and an electric chandelier was still burn- 
ing. The young officer pointed to some trenches in 
the garden. "I had those dug to put the wounded in 
in case we had to hold the place," he said. "It was 
getting pretty hot." 

There was nothing here now, however, and, fol- 
lowed by the London bus with its obedient enlisted 
men doing duty as ambulance orderlies, we motored 
a mile or so farther on to the nearest trench. It was 
in an orchard beside a brick farmhouse with a vista 
in front of barbed-wire entanglement and a carefully 
cleaned firing field stretching out to a village and 
trees about half a mile away. They had looked very 
interesting and difficult, those barbed-wire mazes and 
suburbs, ruthlessly swept of trees and houses, when 
I had seen the Belgians preparing for the siege six 
weeks before, and they were to be of about as much 
practical use now as pictures on a wall. 

There are, it will be recalled, three lines of forts 
about Antwerp — the inner one, corresponding to the 
city's wall; a middle one a few miles farther out, 
where the British now were; and the outer line, which 
the enemy had already passed. Their artillery was 
hidden far over behind the horizon trees, and the 
British marines and naval-reserve men who manned 
these trenches could only wait there, rifle in hand, 
for an enemy that would not come, while a captive 
balloon a mile or two away to the eastward and an 
aeroplane sailing far overhead gave the ranges, and 

50 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

they waited for the shrapnel to burst. The trenches 
were hasty affairs, narrow and shoulder-deep, very 
like trenches for gas or water pipes, and reasonably 
safe except when a shell burst directly overhead. One 
had struck that morning just on the inner rim of the 
trench, blown out one of those crater-like holes, and 
discharged all its shrapnel backward across the trench 
and into one of the heavy timbers supporting a bomb- 
proof roof. A raincoat hanging to a nail in this timber 
was literally shot to shreds. " That's where I was stand- 
ing," said the young lieutenant in command, point- 
ing with a dry smile to a spot not more than a yard 
from where the shell had burst. 

Half a dozen young fellows, crouched there in the 
bomb-proof, looked out at us and grinned. They 
were brand-new soldiers, some of them, boys from 
the London streets who had answered the thrilling 
posters and signs, "Your King and Country Need 
You," and been sent on this ill-fated expedition for 
their first sight of war. The London papers are talk- 
ing about it as I am writing this — how this handful 
of nine thousand men, part of them recruits who 
scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another, were 
flung across the Channel on Sunday night and rushed 
up to the front to be shot at and rushed back again. 
I did not know this then, but wondered if this was 
what they had dreamed of — squatting helplessly in 
a ditch until another order came to retire — when they 
swung through the London streets singing "It's a 
long, long way to Tipperary" two months before. 

51 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

Yet not one of the youngest and the greenest 
showed the least nervousness as they waited there 
in that melancholy little orchard under the incessant 
scream of shells. That unshakable British coolness, 
part sheer pluck, part a sort of lack of imagination, 
perhaps, or at least of "nerves," left them as calm 
and casual as if they were but drilling on the turf of 
Hyde Park. And with it persisted that almost equally 
unshakable sense of class, that touching confidence in 
one's superiors — the young clerk's or mechanic's in- 
born conviction that whatever that smart, clean-cut, 
imperturbable young officer does and says must in- 
evitably be right — at least, that if he is cool and serene 
you must, if the skies fall, be cool and serene too. 

We met one young fellow as we walked through an 
empty lateral leading to a bomb-proof prepared for 
wounded, and the ambulance officer asked him sharply 
how things had been going that morning. 

"Oh, very well, sir," he said with the most respect- 
ful good humor, though a shell bursting just then a 
stone's throw beyond the orchard made both of us 
duck our heads. "A bit hot, sir, about nine o'clock, 
but only one man hurt. They do seem to know just 
where we are, sir; but wait till their infantry comes 
up — we'll clean them out right enough, sir." 

And, if he had been ordered to stay there and hold 
the trench alone, one could imagine him saying, in 
that same tone of deference and chipper good humor, 
"Yes, sir; thank you, sir," and staying, too, till the 
cows came home. 

52 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

We motored down the line to another trench — this 
one along a road with fields in front and, about a couple 
of hundred yards behind, a clump of trees which masked 
a Belgian battery. The officer here, a tall, upstand- 
ing, gravely handsome young man, with a deep, 
strong, slightly humorous voice, and the air of one 
both born to and used to command — the best type of 
navy man — came over to meet us, rather glad, it 
seemed, to see some one. The ambulance officer had 
just started to speak when there was a roar from the 
clump of trees, at the same instant an explosion di- 
rectly overhead, and an ugly chunk of iron — a bit of 
broken casing from a shrapnel shell — plunged at our 
very feet. The shell had been wrongly timed and ex- 
ploded prematurely. 

"I say!" the lieutenant called out to a Belgian 
officer standing not far away, " can't you telephone 
over to your people to stop that? That's the third 
time we've been nearly hit by their shrapnel this 
morning. After all" — he turned to us with the air 
of apologizing somewhat for his display of irritation — 
"it's quite annoying enough here without that, you 
know." 

It was, indeed, annoying — very. The trenches 
were not under fire in the sense that the enemy were 
making a persistent effort to clear them out, but they 
were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and 
there was no telling, when that distant boom thudded 
across the fields, whether that particular shell might 
be intended for them or for somebody's house in town. 

53 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

We could see in the distance their captive balloon, 
and there were a couple of scouts, the officer said, 
in a tower in the village, not much more than half 
a mile away. He pointed to the spot across the barbed 
wire. "We've been trying to get them for the last 
half-hour." 

We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, 
the little rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering 
seeming only to accent the loneliness and helplessness 
of their position, and spun on down the transverse 
road, toward another trench. The progress of the 
motor seemed slow and disappointing. Not that the 
spot a quarter of a mile off was at all less likely to 
be hit, yet one felt conscious of a growing desire to 
be somewhere else. And, though I took off my hat to 
keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a 
shell went over I promptly put it on again, indicat- 
ing, one suspected, a decline in what the military ex- 
perts call morale. 

As we bowled down the road toward a group of 
brick houses on the left, a shell passed not more than 
fifty yards in front of us and through the side of one 
of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through 
a tissue-paper hoop. Almost at the same instant 
another exploded — where, I haven't the least idea, 
except that the dust from it hit us in the face. The 
motor rolled smoothly along meanwhile, and the Bel- 
gian soldier driving it stared as imperturbably ahead 
of him as if he were back at Antwerp on the seat of 
his taxicab. 

54 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

You get used to shells in time, it seems, and, de- 
ciding that you either are or are not going to be hit, 
dismiss responsibility and leave it all to fate. I must 
admit that in my brief experience I was not able to 
arrive at this restful state. We reached at last the 
city gate through which we had left Antwerp, and 
the motor came to a stop just at the inner edge of the 
passage under the fort, and I said good-by to the 
young Englishman ere he started back for the trenches 
again. 

"Well," he called after me as I started across the 
open space between the gate and the houses, a stone's 
throw away, "you've had an experience anyway." 

I was just about to answer that undoubtedly I had 
when — " Tzee-ee-ee-er-r" — a shell just cleared the ram- 
parts over our heads and disappeared in the side of a 
house directly in front of us with a roar and a geyser 
of dust. Neither the motor nor a guest's duty now 
detained me, and, waving him good-by, I turned at 
right angles and made with true civilian speed for the 
shelter of a side street. 

The shells all appeared to be coming from a south- 
east direction, and in the lee of houses on the south 
side of the street one was reasonably protected. Keep- 
ing close to the house-fronts and dodging — rather 
absurdly, no doubt — into doorways when that wailing 
whistle came up from behind, I went zigzagging 
through the deserted city toward the hotel on the 
other side of town. 

It was such a progress as one might make in some 

55 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

fantastic nightmare — as the hero of some eerie piece 
of fiction about the Last Man in the World. Street 
after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sand- 
bags, mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over 
cellar windows; streets in which the only sound was 
that of one's own feet, where the loneliness was made 
more lonely by some forgotten dog cringing against 
the closed door and barking nervously as one hurried 
past. 

Here, where most of the shells had fallen the pre- 
ceding night, nearly all the houses were empty. Yet 
occasionally one caught sight of faces peering up from 
basement windows or of some stubborn householder 
standing in his southern doorway staring into space. 
Once I passed a woman bound away from, instead of 
toward, the river with her big bundle; and once an 
open carriage with a family in it driving, with pe- 
culiarly Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as 
I hurried past the park, along the Avenue Van Dyck — 
where fresh craters made by exploding shells had been 
dug in the turf — the swans, still floating on the little 
lake, placidly dipped their white necks under water 
as if it were a quiet morning in May. 

Now and then, as the shell's wail swung over its 
long parabola, there came with the detonation, across 
the roofs, the rumble of falling masonry. Once I 
passed a house quietly burning, and on the pavement 
were lopped-off trees. The impartiality with which 
those far-off gunners distributed their attentions was 
disconcerting. Peering down one of the up-and- 

56 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

down streets before crossing it, as if a shell were an 
automobile which you might see and dodge, you would 
shoot across and, turning into a cosey little side street, 
think to yourself that here at least they had not come, 
and then promptly see, squarely in front, another of 
those craters blown down through the Belgian blocks. 

Presently I found myself under the trees of the 
Boulevard Leopold, not far from the British hospital, 
and recalled that it was about time that promise was 
made good. It was time indeed, and help with lifting 
they needed very literally. The order had just come 
to leave the building, bringing the wounded and such 
equipment as they could pack into half a dozen motor- 
buses and retire — just where, I did not hear — in the 
direction of Ghent. As I entered the porte-cochere two 
poor wrecks of war were being led out by their nurses 
— more men burned in the powder explosion at Wael- 
hem, their seared faces and hands covered with oil 
and cotton just as they had been lifted from bed. 

The phrase "whistle of shells" had taken on a new 
reality since midnight. Now one was to learn some- 
thing of the meaning of those equally familiar words, 
"they succeeded in saving their wounded, although 
under heavy fire." 

None of the wounded could walk, none dress him- 
self; most of them in ordinary times would have lain 
where they were for weeks. There were fractured 
legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men 
half out of their heads, and all these had to be dressed 
somehow, covered up, crowded into or on top of the 

57 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

buses, and started off through a city under bombard- 
ment toward open country which might already be 
occupied by the enemy. 

Bundles of uniforms, mud-stained, blood-stained, 
just as they had come from the trenches, were dumped 
out of the storeroom and distributed, hit or miss. 

British " Tommies" went out as Belgians, Belgians 
in British khaki; the man whose broken leg I had 
lifted the day before we simply bundled in his bed 
blankets and set up in the corner of a bus. One 
healthy-looking Belgian boy, on whom I was trying 
to pull a pair of British trousers, seemed to have 
nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently 
appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in 
both left arm and left leg. And while we were work- 
ing, an English soldier, shot through the jaw and 
throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a 
hideous, rattling cough. 

The hospital was in a handsome stone building, 
in ordinary times a club, perhaps, or a school; a wide, 
stone stairway led up the centre, and above it was a 
glass skylight. This central well would have been 
a charming place for a shell to drop into, and one did 
drop not more than fifty feet or so away, in or close 
to the rear court. A few yards down the avenue 
another shell hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of 
masonry crashing down on the sidewalk. Under 
conditions like these the nurses kept running up and 
down that staircase during the endless hour or two 
in which the wounded were being dressed and carried 

58 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

on stretchers to the street. They stood by the buses 
making their men comfortable, and when the first 
buses were filled they sat in the open street on top 
of them, patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as 
circus queens on their gilt chariots. The behavior 
of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but they 
at least were fighting men and but taking the chance 
of war. These were civilian volunteers, they had not 
even trenches to shelter them, and it took a rather 
unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave that 
fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and help- 
ful on top of a motor-bus during a wait of half an 
hour or so, any second of which might be one's last. 
There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant 
girl, whom they called, and rightly, "Morning Glory," 
who had been introduced to me the day before because 
we both belonged to that curious foreign race of Amer- 
icans. What her name was I haven't the least idea, 
and if we were to meet to-morrow, doubtless we should 
have to be carefully presented over again, but I 
remember calling out to her, "Good-by, American 
girl !" as we passed in the hall during the last minute 
or two, and she said good-by, and suddenly reached 
out and put her hand on my shoulder and added, 
"Good luck!" or "God bless you!" or something like 
that. And these seemed at the moment quite the 
usual things to do and say. The doctor in charge and 
the general's wife apologized for running away, as 
they called it, and the last I saw of the latter was as 
she waved back to me from the top of a bus, with just 

59 






ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

that look of concern over the desperate ride they were 
beginning which a slightly preoccupied hostess casts 
over a dinner-table about which are seated a number 
of oddly assorted guests. 

The strange procession got away safely at last, 
and safely, too, so I was told later, across the river; 
but where they finally spent the night I never heard. 

I hurried down the street and into the Rue Ner- 
viens. It must have been about four o'clock by that 
time. The bright October morning had changed to 
a chill and dismal afternoon, and up the western sky 
in the direction of the river a vast curtain of greasy, 
black smoke was rolling. The petrol-tanks along the 
Scheldt had been set afire. It looked at the moment 
as if the whole city might be going, but there was no 
time then to think of possibilities, and I slipped down 
the lee side of the street to the door with the Red 
Cross flag. The front of the hospital was shut tight. 
It took several pulls at the bell to bring any one, and 
inside I found a Belgian family who had left their 
own house for the thicker ceilings of the hospital, and 
the nuns back in the wards with their nervous men. 

Their servants had left that morning, the three or 
four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking 
and housework as well as look after their patients, 
and now they were keeping calm and smiling, to sub- 
due as best they could the fears of the Belgian wounded, 
who were ready to jump out of bed, whatever their 
condition, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. 
Each had no doubt that if he were not murdered out- 

60 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

right he would be taken to Germany and forced to 
fight in the east against the Russians. Several, who 
knew very well what was going on outside, had been 
found by the nurses that morning out of bed and all 
ready to take to the street. 

Lest they should hear that their comrades in the 
Boulevard Leopold had been moved, the lay sister — 
the English lady — and I withdrew to the operating- 
room, closed the door, and in that curious retreat 
talked over the situation. No orders had come to 
leave; in fact, they had been told to stay. They did 
have a man now in the shape of the Belgian gentle- 
man, and from the same source an able-bodied ser- 
vant, but how long these would stay, where food was 
to be found in that desolate city, when the bombard- 
ment would cease, and what the Germans would do 
with them — well, it was not a pleasant situation for 
a handful of women. But it was not of themselves 
she was thinking, but of their wounded and of Bel- 
gium, and of what both had suffered already and of 
what might yet be in store. It was of that this frail 
little sister talked that hopeless afternoon, while the 
smoke in the west spread farther up the sky, and she 
would now and then pause in the middle of a syllable 
while a shell sang overhead, then take it up again. 

Meanwhile the light was going, and before it be- 
came quite dark and my hotel deserted, perhaps, as 
the rest of Antwerp, it seemed best to be getting 
across town. I could not believe that the Germans 
could treat such a place and people with anything 

61 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

but consideration and told the little nurse so. She 
came to the edge of the glass-covered court, laugh- 
ingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering 
where we, who had met twice now under such curious 
circumstances, would meet again. Then she turned 
back to the ward — to wait with that roomful of more 
or less panicky men for the tramp of German soldiers 
and the knock on the door which meant that they 
were prisoners. 

Hurrying across town, I passed, not far from the 
Hotel St. Antoine, a blazing four-story building. The 
cathedral was not touched, and indeed, in spite of 
the noise and terror, the material damage was com- 
paratively slight. Soldiers were clearing the quay 
and setting a guard directly in front of our hotel — 
one of the few places in Antwerp that night where 
one could get so much as a crust of bread — and be- 
hind drawn curtains we made what cheer we could. 
There were two American photographers and a corre- 
spondent who had spent the night before in the cellar 
of a house, the upper story of which had been wrecked 
by a shell; a British intelligence officer, with the 
most bewildering way of hopping back and forth be- 
tween a brown civilian suit and a spick-and-span new 
uniform; and several Belgian families hoping to get 
a boat down-stream in the morning. 

We sat round the great fire in the hall, above which 
the architect, building for happier times, had had the 
bad grace to place a skylight, and discussed the time 
and means of getting away. The intelligence officer, 

62 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

not wishing to be made a prisoner, was for getting a 
boat of some sort at the first crack of dawn, and the 
photographers, who had had the roof blown off over 
their heads, heartily agreed with him. I did not like 
to leave without at least a glimpse of those spiked 
helmets nor to desert my friends in the Rue Nerviens, 
and yet there was the likelihood, if one remained, of 
being marooned indefinitely in the midst of the con- 
quering army. 

Meanwhile the flight of shells continued, a dozen or 
more fires could be seen from the upper windows of 
the hotel, and billows of red flame from the burning 
petrol-tanks rolled up the southern sky. It had been 
what might be called a rather full day, and the wail 
of approaching projectiles began to get on one's nerves. 
One started at the slamming of a door, took every dull 
thump for a distant explosion; and when we finally 
turned in I carried the mattress from my room, which 
faced the south, over to the other side of the build- 
ing, and laid it on the floor beside another man's bed. 
Before a shell could reach me it would have to traverse 
at least three partitions and possibly him as well. 

After midnight the bombardment quieted, but shells 
continued to visit us from time to time all night. All 
night the Belgians were retreating across the pon- 
toon bridge, and once — it must have been about two 
or three o'clock — I heard a sound which meant that 
all was over. It was the crisp tramp — different from 
the Belgian shuffle — of British soldiers, and up from 
the street came an English voice, "Best foot forward, 

63 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

boys!" and a little farther on: "Look alive, men; 
they've just picked up our range !" 

I went to the window and watched them tramp 
by — the same men we had seen that morning. The 
petrol fire was still flaming across the south, a steamer 
of some sort was burning at her wharf beside the 
bridge — Napoleon's veterans retreating from Moscow 
could scarcely have left behind a more complete pic- 
ture of war than did those young recruits. 

Morning came dragging up out of that dreadful 
night, smoky, damp, and chill. It was almost a Lon- 
don fog that lay over the abandoned town. I had 
just packed up and was walking through one of the 
upper halls when there was a crash that shook the 
whole building, the sound of falling glass, and out in 
the river a geyser of water shot up, timbers and boards 
flew from the bridge, and there were dozens of smaller 
splashes as if from a shower of shot. I thought that 
the hotel was hit at last and that the Germans, hav- 
ing let civilians escape over the bridge, were turning 
everything loose, determined to make an end of the 
business. It was, as a matter of fact, the Belgians 
blowing up the bridge to cover their retreat. In any 
case it seemed useless to stay longer, and within an 
hour, on a tug jammed with the last refugees, we 
were starting down-stream. 

Behind us, up the river, a vast curtain of lead- 
colored smoke from the petrol-tanks had climbed up 
the sky and spread out mushroomwise, as smoke and 
ashes sometimes spread out from a volcano. This 

64 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

smoke, merging with the fog and the smoke from the 
Antwerp fires, seemed to cover the whole sky. And 
under that sullen mantle the dark flames of the petrol 
still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the 
blazing skeleton of the ship, and on the left Antwerp 
itself, the rich, old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but 
hidden, and now and then sending forth the boom of 
an exploding shell like a groan. 

A large empty German steamer, the Gneisenau, 
marooned here since the war, came swinging slowly 
out into the river, pushed by two or three nervous 
little tugs — to be sunk there, apparently, in mid- 
stream. From the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly 
refused to yield, came explosion after explosion, and 
up and down the river fires sprang up, and there 
were other explosions, as the crushed Belgians, in a 
sort of rage of devastation, became their own de- 
stroyers. 

By following the adventures of one individual I 
have endeavored to suggest what the bombardment 
of a modern city was like — what you might expect if 
an invading army came to-morrow to New York or 
Chicago or San Francisco. I have only coasted along 
the edges of Belgium's tragedy, and the rest of the 
story, of which we were a part for the next two days 
— the flight of those hundreds of thousands of home- 
less people — is something that can scarcely be told— 
you must follow it out in imagination into its count- 
less uprooted, disorganized lives. You must imagine 

65 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

old people struggling along over miles and miles of 
country roads; young girls, under burdens a man 
might not care to bear, tramping until they had to 
carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to 
rest their unaccustomed feet. You must imagine the 
pathetic efforts of hundreds of people to keep clean 
by washing in wayside streams or ditches; imagine 
babies going without milk because there was no milk 
to be had; families shivering in damp hedgerows or 
against haystacks where darkness overtook them; 
and you must imagine this not on one road, but on 
every road, for mile after mile over a whole country- 
side. What was to become of these people when their 
little supply of food was exhausted? Where could 
they go? Even if back to their homes, it would be 
but to lift their hats to their conquerors, never know- 
ing but that the next week or month would sweep the 
tide of war back over them again. 

Never in modern times, not in our generation at 
least, had Europe seen anything like that flight — 
nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful. And 
when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical 
women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. 
In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor 
protestation — at times one might almost have thought 
it some vast, eccentric picnic. No, it was their order- 
liness, their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable 
usefulness, which made the waste and irony of it all 
so colossal and hideous. Each family had its big, 
round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, 

66 



THE FALL OF ANTWERP 

the bags of pears and potatoes; the children had their 
little dolls, and you would see some tired mother with 
her big bundle under one arm and some fluffy little 
puppy in the other. You could not associate them 
with forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and 
libraries or anything but quiet homes and peaceable, 
helpful lives. You could not be swept along by that 
endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the 
day any particular enthusiasm for the red glory of 
war. And when we crossed the Dutch border that 
afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian 
soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be in- 
terned here, presumably until the war was over, one 
could not mourn very deeply their lost chances of 
martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned 
them over to the good-natured Dutch guard. They 
had held back that avalanche long enough, these 
Belgians, and one felt as one would to see lost chil- 
dren get home again or some one dragged from under 
the wheels. 



67 



PARIS AGAIN— AND BORDEAUX 
Journal of a Flight from a London Fog 

These notes began in a London fog and ended in the 
south of France. I had hoped, on reaching Calais, 
to work in toward the fighting along the Yser, but, 
finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel 
away from the front instead of toward it — down to 
see Bordeaux while it was still the temporary capital, 
and to see what life might be like in the French pro- 
vincial towns in war time. 

It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk 
in London said, what you would call a fog, because 
she could still see the porter at the street-door — yet 
day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and un- 
broken gloom. 

One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamp- 
light, as if there were no such thing as sun — recalled 
vaguely a world in which it used to be — woods with 
the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn 
morning, enchanted tropical dawns. 

Through this viscous envelope — a sort of fungi 
thrown off by it — newspapers kept appearing — 
slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the hunt for 
spies, more hysterical and shrill. One looked for fair- 

68 



PARIS AGAIN 

ness almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguard- 
ing long enough men who could not answer back and, 
after all, were flinging their lives away bravely over 
there in France, one ended by giving them the very 
qualities they were denied. 

They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon 
screen fades into another — even as one read " Huns' ' 
for the thousandth time the Huns turned into kindly 
burghers smoking pipes and singing songs. In the 
same way the England of tradition — Shakespeare, 
Dickens, Meredith, jolly old rumbling London, rides 
'cross country, rows on the river — faded into this 
nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight. The psy- 
chology was very simple, but too much, it seems, for 
censors and even editors. And, unfortunately, at a 
time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike 
fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind 
in homes, but newspapers are likely to be an out- 
sider's most constant companions. 

A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at 
last, in which the mere stony Briticism of the London 
hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke again 
into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to an- 
other of those staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. . . . 
But why staggering? Can you not take coffee and 
rolls in London as well as in some Paris cafe? It 
would seem so, yet it cannot be done. The mere 
sight and sound — or lack of sound — of that warm, 
softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some 
gloomy, inevitable mechanism as it has moved for 

69 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

countless years, attacks the already weakened will 
like an opiate. At the first bewildering "'Q?" from 
that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you 
and you bow before porridge, kippers, bacon and 
eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade, toast, more toast, 
more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the 
proverbial boa — except that in this case the rabbit 
swallows its own asphyxiator. 

Another breakfast like this, another day of rain 
and fog, another a 'Q?" — it was in some such state of 
mind as this that I packed up one night and took the 
early train for Folkestone. 

Folkestone, Friday. 

Sunshine at last — a delicious autumn afternoon — clean air, 
quiet, and the sea. Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling 
slowly in; along the horizon a streak of smoke from some 
patrolling destroyer or battleship. And all along this cliff 
walk, Belgians — strolling with their children, sitting on the 
benches, looking out to sea. Just beyond that hazy white 
wall to the east — the cliffs of France — the fight for Calais is 
being fought — they can almost hear the cannon. 

In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk: 

"It was two o'clock in the morning when we left Ant- 
werp. . . ." 

"And imagine — it was not three metres from our doorstep 
that the shell burst. . . ." 

"We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morn- 
ing " 

On the balcony of some one's summer-house, now turned 
into a hospital, four Belgian soldiers, one with his head band- 
aged, are playing cards — jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly 
tipped over one ear, slamming the cards down as if that were 

70 



PARIS AGAIN 

the only thing in the world. In the garden others taking the 
sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through the 
shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse- 
maids and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo. 

The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint 
picture, for sun and space and quiet seem to have wiped out 
their terror — that passed through is as far away as that now 
hidden in the east. Is it merely quiet and sun? Perhaps it is 
the look of a "nice little people" who know that now they have 
a history. "Refugees," to be sure, yet one can fancy them 
looking back some day from their tight little villages, canals, 
and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on the days of their 
great adventure — when they could sit in the sun above the 
sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze 
under which their sons and husbands and brothers and King 
were fighting for the last corner of their country. . . . 

Calais, Saturday. 

Belgian officers, parks of Belgian military automobiles; up- 
country a little way the Germans going down in tens of thou- 
sands to win their "gate to England" — yet we came across 
on the Channel boat last evening as usual and had little trouble 
finding a room. There were tons of Red Cross supplies on 
board — cotton, chloroform, peroxide; Belgian soldiers patched 
up and going back to fight; and various volunteer nurses, in- 
cluding two handsome young Englishwomen of the very modern 
aviatrix type — coming over to drive motor-cycle ambulances — 
and so smartly gotten up in boots and khaki that a little way 
off you might have taken them for British officers. At the 
wharf were other nurses, some of whom I had last seen that 
Thursday afternoon in Antwerp as they and their wounded 
rolled away in London buses from the hospital in the Boule- 
vard Leopold. 

This morning, strolling round the town, I ran into a couple 
of English correspondents. There were yet several hours be- 

71 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

fore they need address themselves to the arduous task of de- 
scribing fighting they had not seen, and they talked, with a 
good humor one sometimes misses in their correspondence, of 
German collectivism and similar things. One had spent a good 
deal of time in Germany. 

"They're the only people who have solved the problem of 
industrial cities without slums — you must say that for them. 
Of course, in those model towns of theirs, you've got to brush 
your teeth at six minutes past eight and sleep on your left side 
if the police say so — they're astonishing people for doing what 
they're told. 

" One day in Dresden I walked across a bit of grass the public 
weren't supposed to cross. An old gentleman fairly roared 
the instant he saw me. He was ready to explode at the mere 
suggestion that any one could think of disobeying a rule made 
for all of them. 

ili Das harm man nicht thun ! Es ist verboten !'" 

The other quoted the answer of an English factory-owner to 
some of his employees who did not want to enlist. " They've 
done a lot for working men over there," the man said. " Acci- 
dent-insurance, old-age pensions, and all that — what do we 
want to fight the Kaiser for ? We'd just about as soon be under 

Billy as George." And X said to them: "If you were 

under Kaiser Billy, you'd enlist right enough, there's no doubt 
of that!" 

Boulogne, Saturday. 

He sat in the corner of our compartment coming down from 
Calais this afternoon, an old Algerian soldier, homeward bound, 
with a big, round loaf of bread and a military pass. He had a 
blue robe, bright-red, soft boots, a white turban wound with a 
sort of scarf of brown cord and baggy corduroy underneath, 
concealing various mysterious pockets. 

"Paris? To-night?" he grunted in his queer French. The 
big Frenchman next him, who had served in Africa in his youth 

72 



PARIS AGAIN 

and understood the dialect, shook his head. "To-morrow 
morning!" he said. He laid his head on his hand to suggest 
a man sleeping, and held up three fingers. "Three days — 
Marseilles !" The old goumier's dark eyes blazed curiously, 
and he opened and shut his mouth in a dry yawn — like a tiger 
yawning. 

Wounded? No — he pointed to his eyes, which were blood- 
shot, patted his forehead to suggest that it was throbbing, 
rubbed his legs, and scowled. " Rheumatism ! " said the French- 
man. The Algerian pressed his palms together six times, then 
held up two fingers. "He's sixty-two years old!" said the 
Frenchman, and the old warrior obligingly opened his jaws and 
pointed to two or three lone brown fangs to prove it. They 
talked for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman 
explained again, "Volunteer!" and then, "Scout!" 

The old Arab made the motion of sighting along a rifle, then 
of brushing something over, and tapped himself on the chest. 

"Deux!" he said. "Two Germans — me!" Evidently he 
was going back to the desert satisfied. 

Train after train passed us, northward bound, some from 
Boulogne, some from the trenches north of Paris evidently, 
bringing artillery caked with mud — all packed with British 
soldiers leaning from doors of their cattle-cars, hats pushed 
back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking. At the end of 
each train, in passenger-coaches, their officers — tall, slim-legged 
young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats, 
with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather 
superior sort of sport. 

The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, 
efficient, light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and 
Shakespeare, as Dickens and Dumas — and in the same ways ! 

An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few 
nights before of the "extraordinary detachment" of Tommy 
Atkins. 

73 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

"Take almost any of those little French soldiers — they've got 
a pretty good idea what the war is about — at any rate, they've 
got a sentiment about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll 
go to their death shouting for la patrie. Now, Tommy Atkins 
isn't the least like that. He doesn't fight — and you know how 
he does fight — for patriotism or glory, at least not in the same 
conscious way. He'd fight just as well against another of his 
own regiments — if you know what I mean. He's just — well, 
look at the soldiers' letters. The Germans are sentimental — 
they are all martyrs. The Frenchmen are all heroes. But 
Tommy Atkins — well, he's just playing football!" 

The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in 
another way by a British sailor at the time of the sinking of 
the Aboukir, Cressy, and Rogue. 

Imagine, for a moment, that scene — the three great ships 
going over like stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy 
flanks into the sea, boats overturned and smashed, in the thick 
of it the wet nose of the German submarine coming up for a 
look round, and then, out of that hideous welter, the voice of 
a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the face of all this modern 
science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or whatever it was 
he saw first, and bellowing: 

" Smash the blighter's head! " 

There are phrases like these which could only have been said 
by the people who say them; they are like windows suddenly 
opening down cycles of racial history and difference. At a 
Regent Street moving-picture show a few evenings ago two 
young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls driven off the Paris 
boulevards by the same impartial force which has driven grub- 
bing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke 
a little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for 
her companion. 

There were pictures of the silk industry in Japan — moths 
emerging from cocoons, the breeding process, the hatching of 
the eggs, the life history of these anonymous little specks mag- 

74 



PARIS AGAIN 

nified until for the moment they almost had a sort of personal- 
ity. And one murmured: 

"Comme c'est drole, la nature!" 

Sunday. 

It was dusk when we reached Boulogne last night — frosty 
dusk, with the distant moan of a fog-horn, and under the mist 
hilly streets busy with soldiers and bright with lights. It made 
one think of a college town at home on the eve of the great 
game, so keen and happy seemed all these fit young men — 
officers swinging by with their walking-sticks, soldiers spin- 
ning yarns in smoky cafes — for the great game of war. 

The hotels were full of wounded or officers — to Boulogne 
comes the steady procession of British transports — but an ami- 
able porter led me to a little side street and a place kept by 
a retired English merchant-marine officer who had married a 
Frenchwoman. Paintings, such as sailor-artists make, of the 
ships he had served in were on the walls, a photograph of him- 
self and his mates taken in the sunshine of some tropical port; 
and, with its cheerful hot stove, the place combined the air of 
a French cafe with the cosiness of an English inn. 

Very comfortable, indeed, I leaned over one of the tables 
that ran along the wall, while two British soldiers alongside 
gossiped and sipped their beer, and ran over the columns of 
La Boulonnaise. Here, too, war seemed a jolly man's game, 
and I came to "Military Court Sitting at Boulogne," and be- 
neath it the following: 

"Seventh, eighth, and ninth cases. Thefts by German prison- 
ers of war. The accused are Antoine Michels, twenty-five years, 
native of Treves, Twenty-seventh German Chasseurs, made 
prisoner at Lens. Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years, native 
of Landenheissen (Grand Duchy of Hesse), Fourth Regiment 
Dragoons, made prisoner at Lille. Max Benninghoven, twenty- 
two years, Seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Bail- 
leul. 

75 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

"The three had in their possession at the moment of their 
capture: Michels, two pairs of earrings, a steel watch, two 
medals representing the town of Arras, and a cigar-holder; 
Falk, a woman's watch and chain in addition to his own; Ben- 
ninghoven, a pocketbook, a pack of cards, and money that did 
not belong to him. 

"All were subjected to a severe examination and condemned : 
Michels, to five years in prison and a fine of five hundred francs ; 
Falk, to twenty years at forced labor. . . ." 

And these few words of newspaper type, which nobody else 
seemed to be noticing, somehow — as if one had stubbed one's 
toe — disturbed the picture. They did not fit in with the rakish 
gray motor-car, labelled "Australia," I saw after dinner, nor 
the young infantryman I ran across on a street corner who had 
been in the fighting ever since Mons and was but down " for a 
rest" before jumping in again, nor the busy streets and buzz- 
ing cafes. But across them, for some reason, all evening, one 
couldn't help seeing Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years old, 
of Landenheissen, starting down toward Paris last August, 
singing " Deutschland uber Alles !" and wondering what he 
might be thinking about the great game of war fifteen years 
from now. 

While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host 
walked up and down the cafe, delivering himself on the sub- 
ject of mines in the North Sea. The Germans began it, now 
the English must take it up; but as for him, speaking as one 
who had followed the sea, it was poor business. Why couldn't 
people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a 
ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives? . . . 

Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man 
whom I had last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently 
on the orderlies' bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly. 
The ambulance is as hard to get into as an exclusive club, for 
the woods are full these days of volunteers who, leading rather 

76 



PARIS AGAIN 

decorative lives in times of peace, have been shaken awake by 
the war into helping out overtaxed embassies, making beds in 
hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike delight 
in the novelty of work. This young man wore a Red Cross 
button now and paused long enough to impart the following 
— characteristic of the things we non-combatants hear daily, 
and which, authentic or not, help to "make life interesting": 

1. An English general just down from the front had told 
him that four thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial 
party after the fighting along the Yser, and had buried, by 
actual count, thirty-nine thousand Germans. 

2. In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German 
and Indian wounded were put in the same ward. In the night 
the Indians got up and cut the Germans' throats. 

I climbed up through narrow, cobblestoned streets to the 
higher part of the town. It was pleasant up here in the frosty 
morning — old houses, archways, and courts, and the bells toll- 
ing people to church. 

Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hearses in black 
and silver, after the French fashion, with drivers in black 
coats and black-and-silver cocked hats. People stopped as 
they passed, a woman crossed herself, men took off their hats 
— farther up the hill a French sentry suddenly straightened 
and presented arms. 

The three caskets were draped in flags — not the tricolor, 
but the Union Jack. No mourners followed them, and as the 
ancient vehicles climbed over the brow of the hill the people 
kept looking, feeling, perhaps, that something was lacking, 
wondering who the strangers might be who had given their 
lives to France. 

Monday. 
Paris again — a gray Paris, with bare tree-trunks, dead leaves 
on the sidewalk, and in the air the chill of approaching winter. 

77 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

Across the gray distances one fancies now and then to have 
seen the first stray flakes of snow, and in some old street, be- 
tween tall, gray houses leaning backward, sidewise, each after 
its fashion — as some girl, pale, with shawl wrapped about her 
shoulders, hurries past with a quick upcasting of dark eyes, 
one thinks of Mimi and the third act of "La Boheme." 

Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, 
gray stillness — that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, 
and personal, which has drawn so many through the years, 
becomes more moving and real. There is more animation in 
the streets now: shops are opening, cabs tooting down the 
Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but most 
of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists, 
pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone — 
every thought and energy is with the men fighting on that 
long line across the north. It is a Paris of the French — of a 
France united as never before, perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, 
resolute, defending her life and her precious inheritance. 

The Temporary Capital 

Tuesday. 

A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves 
of coarse bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost 
as hard — remember the almost carnivorous joy with which a 
Frenchman devours bread! — to which the military govern- 
ment, at the beginning of the war, condemned Paris. 

The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too 
much time and there were not enough bakers left to do the 
work — and inspectors see that the law is obeyed, whether 
amiable bakers think they have time or not. And people want 
light bread, curly rolls, "pain de fantaisie." All very well for 
General Gallieni! says the journalist; he likes hard bread; but 
why must several million people go on cracking their teeth 
because of that idiosyncrasy? 

78 



BORDEAUX 

The government is obdurate. If fancy bread were made, 
only the big bakers would have time to make it, little ones 
would be without clients, and that this highly centralized, 
paternal government cannot allow. Hard bread it is, then, 
for another while at least — "C'est la guerre!" 

Thursday. 

We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the 
first since war was declared. To-morrow night sleeping-cars 
go back again — more significant than one might think who 
had not seen the France of a few months ago, when everything 
was turned over to the army and people sat up all night in day 
coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe to Paris. 

Down through the heart of France — Tours, Poitiers, An- 
gouleme — past trim little French rivers, narrow, winding, 
still, and deep, with rows of poplars close to the water's edge, 
and still a certain air of coquetry, in spite of bare branches 
and fallen leaves — past brown fields across which teams of 
oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing the 
furrow for next spring's wheat. It's the old men who are plough- 
ing — except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man 
in sight. And everywhere soldiers — wounded ones bound for 
southern France; reserves not yet sent up. 

Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; 
then, just after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, 
where the civil government obligingly fled when the enemy 
was rolling down on Paris in the first week of September. 

Bordeaux, Monday. 
Bordeaux is a day's railroad ride from Paris— twelve hours 
away from the German cannon, which even now are only fifty 
miles north of the boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and 
Africa. And you feel both these things. 

All about you is the wine country — the names of towns and 
villages round about read like a wine-card — and, as you are 

79 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

lunching in some little side-street restaurant, a table is moved 
away, a trap-door opens, and monsieur the proprietor looks on 
while the big casks of claret are rolled in from the street and 
lowered to the cellar and the old casks hauled up again. You 
are close to the wine country and close to the sea — to oysters 
and crabs and ships — and to the hot sun and more exuberant 
spirits of the Midi. The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise — there 
are pretty girls in Bordeaux — often seems closer to Madrid 
than to Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the 
Mediterranean, and the crisp words of Paris are broken up and 
even an extra vowel added now and then, until they ripple like 
Spanish or Italian. " Pe4ite-a ma-dame-a, !" rattles some little 
newsboy, ingratiating himself with an indifferent lady of un- 
certain age; and the porter will bring your boots in no time — 
in "une-a pe~tite-a mi-nute-a." 

The war is in everybody's mind, of course — no one in France 
thinks of anything else — but there is none of that silence and 
tenseness, that emotional tremor, one feels in Paris. The Ger- 
mans will never come here, one feels, no matter what happens, 
and as you read the communiques in La Petite Gironde and 
La Liberie du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I feel 
pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards 
in New York. 

In fact, one of the first and abiding impressions of Bordeaux 
is that it is a great place for things to eat — oysters from Ma- 
rennes, lobsters and langoustes, pears big as cantaloupes, pome- 
granates, mushrooms — the little ones and the big cepes of 
Bordeaux — yellow dates just up from Tunis. The fruiterers' 
shops not only make you hungry, but into some of them you 
may enter and find a quiet little room up-stairs, where the 
proprietor and his wife and daughter, in the genial French 
fashion, will serve you with a cosey little dinner with wine for 
three francs, in front of the family grate fire, and the privilege 
of ordering up anything you want from the shop-window below. 

There are attractive little chocolate and pastry shops and 

80 



BORDEAUX 

cheerful semipension restaurants where whole families, in- 
cluding, in these days, minor politicians with axes to grind 
and occasional young women from the boulevards, all dine 
together in a warm bustle of talk, smoke, the gurgle of claret, 
and tear off chunks of hard French bread, while madame the 
proprietress, a handsome, dark-eyed, rather Spanish-looking 
Bordelaise, sails round, subduing the impatient, smiling at 
those who wish to be smiled at, and ordering her faithful waiters 
about like a drill-sergeant. 

And then there is the Chapon fin. When you speak to some 
elderly gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an 
acquaintance with southern France of your intention of going 
to Bordeaux, he murmurs reminiscently : " Ah, yes ! . . . 
There is a restaurant there... . ." He means the Chapon fin. 
It was famous in '70 when the government came here before, 
and to-day when the young King of Spain motors over from 
Biarritz he dines there. Coming down on the train, I read in 
the Revue des Deux Mondes the recollections of a gentleman 
who was here in '70-7 1 and is here again now. He was inclined 
to be sarcastic about the present Chapon fin. In his day one 
had good food and did not pay exorbitantly; now "one needs 
a quasi-official introduction to penetrate, and the stylish ser- 
vants, guarding the door like impassable dragons, ask with a 
discreet air if monsieur has taken care to warn the manage- 
ment of his intention of taking lunch." 

We -penetrated without apparent difficulty — possibly owing 
to the exalted position of the two amiable young attaches 
who entertained me — and the food was very good. There 
were diplomats of all sorts to be seen, a meridional head waiter, 
and an interesting restaurant cat. One end of the room is an 
artificial grotto, and into and out of the canvas rocks this 
enormous cat kept creeping, thrusting his round face and 
blazing eyes out of unexpected holes in the manner of the true 
carnivora, as if he had been trained by the management as an 
entertainer. The head waiter would have lured an anchorite 

81 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

into temporary abandon. Toward the end of the evening we 
discussed the probable character of a certain dessert, suggesting 
some doubt of taking it. You might as well have doubted 
his honor. " Mais, monsieur !" He waved his arms. "C'est 
delicieux ! . . . C'est merveilleux ! . . . C'est quelque chose" 
— slowly, with thumb and first finger pressed together — " de 
r-r-raf-fi-ne !" . . . 

It is to this genial provincial city that the President and 
his ministers have come. They distributed themselves about 
town in various public and private buildings; the Senate chose 
one theatre for its future meeting-place and the Chamber of 
Deputies another. And from these places, sometimes the most 
incongruous — one hears, for instance, of M. Delcasse main- 
taining his dignity in a bedroom now used as the office for the 
minister of foreign affairs — the red tape is unwound which 
eventually sends the life-blood of the remotest province flow- 
ing up to its appointed place at the front. 

There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that 
of France, stretching clear across the country from Switzer- 
land to the Channel, could not live unless it had a smoothly 
running civil machine in the quiet country behind. Neither 
of the chambers is in session, and except that the main streets 
are busy — one is told that one hundred thousand extra people 
are in town — you might almost never know that anything out 
of the ordinary had occurred. Things must be very different, 
of course, from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened 
with revolution, France had to decide between surrendering 
Alsace and Lorraine and going on with the war. 

The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, 
an occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices 
of one of the newspapers, a conference. I went to one of these, 
given by a French professor of English literature in the Uni- 
versity of Bordeaux, on the timely subject: "Kipling and 
Greater England." 

You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene — the polite 

82 



BORDEAUX 

matinee audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind 
the speaker, the table, the shaded lamp, and the professor him- 
self, a slender, dark gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed 
black beard, and penetrating eyes — suggesting vaguely a pres- 
tidigitateur — trying, by sheer intelligence and delicate, critical 
skill, to bridge the gaps of race and instinctive thought and 
feeling and make his audience understand Kipling. 

Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day: 
"Through the Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the 
English and those who fight, in the great winds of the North 
Sea, that combat rude and brave. We admired the faithful 
indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put their mus- 
cular arms at the service of the empire. . . ." 

It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful 
compliment to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author 
of "Soldiers Three" and the "Barrack Room Ballads/' and 
with him the nation behind him, into the smooth mould of a 
conference — that mixture, so curiously French, of clear think- 
ing and graceful expression, of sensitive definition and personal 
charm, all blended into a whole so intellectually neat and 
modulated that an audience like this may take it with the 
same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which 
their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea. 

A Frenchman of a generation ago would scarcely have rec- 
ognized the England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux pro- 
fessor, and I am not sure that in this entirely altruistic big 
brother of little nations the English would have recognized 
themselves. But, at any rate, polite flutters of applause punc- 
tuated the talk, and at the end M. Cestre asked his audience 
to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people now fighting 
the common battle with France. They all stood up and, smil- 
ing up at the left-hand proscenium-box, saluted the British 
ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, with long and enthusiastic 
applause. A man in the gallery even ventured a " Heep ! 
heep!" and every one drifted out very content, indeed. 

83 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

In the foyer I saw one lady carefully spelling out with her 
lorgnette one of the words on the list posted there of the sub- 
jects for conferences. 

" Ah ! " she said, considerably reassured apparently, " Keep- 
ling ! " But then she may have come in late. 

Thursday. 

The war has been hard on the main business of the neighbor- 
hood, of course — Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux 
wine, Russia next, and not as much as usual is going to England. 
The vintage this year, like that of '70, is said to be good, how- 
ever, and, though the young men have gone, and the wine- 
making was not as gay as usual, there were enough old men 
and women left to do the work. I visited one of the older wine 
houses — nearly two centuries old — and tramped through cel- 
lars which burrow on two levels under a whole city block. 
There were some two million bottles down there in the dark 
and dust. 

There is something patriarchal and princely about such a 
house, almost unknown in our businesses at home — from the 
portraits of the founders, from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, 
broiling their own fish over a huge fireplace and drawing wine 
from the common cask as they have done for generations; 
the stencils in the shipping-room — "Baltimore," "Bogota," 
"Buenos Aires," "Chicago," "Calcutta," " Chris tiania," "Ca- 
racas" — from things like these to the personality and point of 
view of the men who have the business in charge. 

"Now, wine," began the charming gentleman who showed 
us round, "is a living thing. ..." And though you could see 
that he had showed many people about in his day — and was 
not unaware of what might interest them — that he was, in 
short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one 
could also see that he liked his work and believed in it, and 
grew wine as an amateur grows fancy tulips and not as a mere 
salesman. 

84 



BORDEAUX 

To be sure, he was inclined to slur over the importance of 
white wine, while champagne and its perfidious makers didn't 
interest him in the least; but of the red wine of Bordeaux, 
its lightness, bouquet, and general beneficence, and the del- 
icate and affectionate care with which it was handled, one 
could have heard him talk all day. Now and then younger 
houses discovered things that were going to revolutionize the 
wine trade. 

"Of course," he said, "we examine such things. We look 
in our books, where records of all our experiments are kept, 
and there we find that we tried that new thing in 1856 — or 
1756, perhaps.' ' 

Far underground we came on some of the huge majorums, 
big as nine ordinary bottles. "The King of Spain ran over to 
Bordeaux one day, and came to us and said: 'I've got two 
hours; what can you show me?' We said: 'We can show you 
our cellars.' 'Very well,' said he; 'go ahead.' When he came 
to the majorums he said: 'What on earth do you do with 
those?' 'They are used when there is a christening or a wed- 
ding or some great event, and when a king visits us we give 
him two.'" 

So they sent the majorums to the young King, and the King 
sent back a polite note, just as if he were anybody else, and 
that is all of that story. 

Most of the newspapers which followed the government to 
Bordeaux have returned to the capital, but that intransigeant 
government-baiter, the venerable Georges Clemenceau, still 
continues his bombardment from close range. His paper was 
formerly U Homme Libre — The Free Man — but on being sup- 
pressed this fall by the censor its octogenarian editor gayly 
changed its name to The Chained Man — L'Homme Enchaine 
— and continued fire. 

The mayor of a Paris commune in 71, prime minister from 
1906-9, the editor of various papers, and senator now, Clemen- 

85 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

ceau is properly feared; and he was offered, it is said, a place 
in the present government, but would accept no post but the 
highest. He preferred his role of political realist and critical 
privateer, a sort of Mr. Shaw of French politics, hitting a head 
wherever he sees one. 

The imperfections of the French army sanitary service, the 
censorship, and the demoralization of the postal service since 
the war have been favorite targets recently. There has been 
much complaint of the difficulty of getting news from men 
at the front. M. Viviani, the premier, in an address at Reims, 
ventured to say that it was his duty to " organize, administer, 
and intensify the national defense." On this innocent phrase 
the eye of M. Clemenceau fell the other day, and he now flings 
off a characteristic three-and-a-half-column front-page salvo 
so adroitly combining the premier's remark with the actual, 
pitiful facts that the reader almost feels that "intensifying" 
the suffering of parents and friends of men fighting for their 
country is something in which the present government takes 
delight. 

I wish there was space to quote the editorial. I may, at any 
rate, quote from one or two of the letters written to M. Clemen- 
ceau, to suggest a stay-at-home aspect of the war of which we 
do not hear much. This is from the mayor of Pont-en-Royans: 

"Officially," he writes, "on September 29 I was asked to 
notify the family of the soldier Regnier of his death. In the 
midst of their cries and tears, the family showed me the last 
letter, received that very morning, and dated the 27th September, 
two days before. Now, the notice of his death was dated Sep- 
tember 7, and I said to the father: 

'"I would not give you too much hope; your son probably 
died the 27th, suddenly, perhaps, and the secretary charged with 
writing the letter I have received forgot a figure — instead of 
27 he put 7. Meanwhile, as a doubt exists, I will do what I 
can to clear the matter up.' 

"The Administrative Counsel replied to me: ' There has been 

86 



BORDEAUX 

no error. The notice of decease is dated September 27. //, 
then, the soldier wrote the 27th, he is not dead. We shall inform 
the ministry, and you, on your side, should write to the hospital 
where he is being treated/ 

"I wrote to the chief doctor at Besancon. No response. I 
sent him a telegram with the reply prepaid. No response. I 
wrote him a third letter, this time a trifle sarcastic. I received 
finally a despatch: * Regnier is not known at this hospital. 3 

"I still had the telegram in my hand when to my house came 
the sister of the dead soldier, in mourning, and beaming, and 
gave me a letter. 'It is my brother who has written us.' So 
there was no mistake. The dead man wrote on the 2d October. 

"'Very well,' said I to the family. 'Are you sufficiently re- 
assured now?' 

"Some days after I received from the Red Cross hospital at 
Besancon a letter giving me news of Regnier and explaining 
that there were several hospitals in the town, that they had 
only just received my letter, etc., etc. 

"I did not think more of the matter until October 23, when I 
received a circular from the prefecture of Isere, asking me to 
advise the Regnier family that the soldier Regnier, wounded, 
was being treated at the hospital of Besancon. 

"At last I thought the affair was closed, when, to-day, 
October 30, I received the enclosed despatch, sent by I know 
not whom, informing me that the soldier Regnier is unknown 
in the hospital of Besancon! 

"Oh, my head, my head ! . . " 

You can imagine what this slashing old privateer would 
do with a letter like this. The censor will not permit him to 
make any comment. Very well — he wishes to make none. 
"You see, Mr. Viviani, it isn't one of those execrable par- 
liamentarians who makes these complaints. It is a mayor, 
a humble mayor, officially designated by you to transmit to his 
people the striking results of your 'organization,' of your 'ad- 
ministration,' of your 'intensification' in the cruelly delicate 

87 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

matter of giving news to families. He supplies the picture, and 
you see in plain daylight your * intensification' at work. What 
do you think of it? What can you say about it? Do you 
believe that because you have given to your censor the right 
— pardon me, the 'power — to make white spaces in the columns 
of newspapers that that is going to suppress the fact? Do 
you belie ve," etc., etc. 

In the same editorial was a letter from a father whose two 
sons, on the firing-line, had received none of the family letters 
since the beginning of the war and wrote pathetically asking 
if their parents and little sister were ill, or how they had of- 
fended. A wife enclosed a letter from her husband, telling how 
he was suffering from the cold because of insufficient clothing; 
a doctor wrote protesting because there was not a single bottle 
of an ti tetanic serum in his field-hospital. 

We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one after- 
noon — a leonine old gentleman bundled up in cap and over- 
coat before a little grate fire, while a secretary ran through 
the big heap of letters piled on the bed. In the corner of the 
room was a roll-top desk — the sanctum, evidently, of The 
Chained Man. 

As M. Clemenceau was insistent that he should not be in- 
terviewed, I may not repeat the exceedingly lively talk on all 
sorts of people and things with which he regaled us once — and 
it didn't take long — he "got going." 

One purely personal little bit of information may be passed 
on, however, in the hope that it may be as interesting to other 
practitioners of a laborious trade as it was to me. 

We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day 
after day, columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether 
he wrote in longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter. 

This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war- 
horse greatly. He went to his desk and brought back a sheet 
of paper, half of which was covered with a small, firm hand- 
writing. It was his next day's broadside, not yet finished. 

88 



BORDEAUX 

"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said. "I get 
up at half past three every morning. I am at that desk most 
of the day; I go to bed at nine o'clock. If I had to write a 
banal note, it might take time, but there are certain ideas 
which I have worked with all my life. I worked a good many 
years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and 
when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am eighty- 
three years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time" 
— the old gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, 
and, with a quick movement of shoulders and hands, con- 
cluded — "it would be a public calamity — a malheur public!" 

I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charla- 
tans and editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young 
artists ruined as painters by becoming popular illustrators, 
the young writers content to substitute overpaid banality and 
bathos for honest work, and I must confess that the sight of 
this indomitable old fighter, who had known great men and 
held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up 
before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid 
prose, stirred every drop of what you might call one's intel- 
lectual sporting blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the 
justice of his attacks less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he 
is something of a trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bun- 
dled up in his overcoat and cap, in that chilly lodging-house 
room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight and of charm, he seemed 
to stand for that wonderful French spirit — for its ardor and 
penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its tireless in- 
telligence and unquenchable fire. 

Monday. 
The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy 
when we met on the steamer last August; not quite so odd 
when we bumped into each other in Bordeaux; and now it 
turns out to mean, in addition to being a young University of 
Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis Fs 
castle still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the sum- 
mer, and in these days hearing a charming old French gentle- 
man, vice-consul, tell how he fought against the Prussians in 70. 

Cognac is a real place, it appears — an old town of twenty 
thousand people or so, and it is really where cognac comes 
from, all other brandies being, of course, as one will learn here, 
mere upstart eaux-de-vie. We went through some of the 
cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in 
Bordeaux, although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because 
not so "alive." For wine is a living thing, as the man said 
in Bordeaux, and it must be ignobly boiled and destroyed be- 
fore turning into a distilled spirit. To some this pale spiritual 
essence may possess a finer poetry — the cellars are more fra- 
grant, at any rate. 

All the young men had gone to the front — their wages con- 
tinued as usual — and the work was carried on by women and 
old servitors, scarcely one of the latter under seventy. They 
were pointed out as examples of the beneficent effect of the 
true cognac — these old boys who had inhaled the slightly 
pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their 
lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac. It comes wan- 
dering down old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people 
live literally in a fine mist of it. The very stones are turned 
black by the faint fumes. 

There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look 
more or less like this — the young men gone or drilling in the 
neighborhood, the schools turned into hospitals, the little old 
provincial hotels sheltering families fled from Paris. There 
are several such at our hotel, nice, comfortable people — you 
might think you were in some semi-summer-resort hotel at 
home — Ridgefield, Conn., for instance, in winter time. 

The making of cognac occupies nearly every one, one way 
or another, and it has made the place next to the richest town 
of its size in France. They make the cognac, and they make 

90 



BORDEAUX 

the bottles for it in a glass factory on a hill overlooking the 
town — about as airy and pleasant a place for a factory as one 
could imagine. The molten glass is poured into moulds, the 
moulds closed — psst! a stream of compressed air turned in, the 
bottles blown, and there you are — a score or so of them turned 
out every minute. As we came out of the furnace-room into 
the chilly afternoon a regiment of reservists tramped in from 
a practise march in the country. Some were young fellows, 
wearing uniforms for the first time, apparently; some looked 
like convalescents drafted back into the army. They took 
one road and we another, and half an hour later swung down 
the main street of Cognac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles. 
All over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like 
this these frosty afternoons. 

Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the 
regular connection and had to spend the night at Saintes. 
The tall, quizzical, rather grim old landlady of the neat little 
Hotel de la Gare — characteristic of that rugged France which 
tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know little about — 
was plainly puzzled. There we were, two able-bodied men, 

and P , saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked 

that he lived in Cognac. "In Cognac !" the old woman re- 
peated, looking from one to the other, and then added, as 
one putting an unanswerable question: "But you are not 
soldiers ? " 

We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in. 
There was scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end 
of the town a handful of young fellows passed on the other 
side singing. They were boys of the 1915 class who had been 
called out and in a few days would be getting ready for war. 
In Paris you will see young fellows just like them, decorated 
with flags and feathers, driving round town in rattle-trap wagons 
like picnic parties returning on a summer night at home. Arm 
in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing as 
they marched: 

91 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

" II est rouge et noir et blanc, 
Etfendu au denier e — a" 

" He's red, white, and black, 
And split up the back ! " 

They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets 
of Berlin as now they were marching down the streets of Saintes 
— and they kept flinging back through the frosty dark: 

u Il est rouge — et noir — et blanc — 
Etfendu — au derriere — a. . „ ." 



92 



VI 

"THE GREAT DAYS" 

They were playing "The Categorical Imperative' ' 
that evening at the Little Theatre in Unter den Lin- 
den. It is an old-fashioned comedy laid in the Vienna 
of 1815 — two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told, 
across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese 
salon, we dimly see Napoleon return from Elba and 
hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young cub of a Saxon 
schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and 
philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, 
taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, 
becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as 
he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the 
younger with her freshness, present a dualism more 
bewildering than any he has ever read about in his 
philosophy books, and part of the fun consists in seeing 
him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure 
reason, and finally, when the motherly young count- 
ess has quietly got him a professorship at Konigsberg, 
present to his delighted Elise his "categorical imper- 
ative." 

You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture 
of sentiment and philosophy, the quaint references 
to a Prussia not yet, in its present sense, begun to 

93 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

exist; how to that audience — nearly every one of 
whom had a son or husband or brother at the front — 
the century suddenly seemed to close up and the 
Napoleonic days became part of their own "grosse 
Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and 
the frivolous older man going off to war ; and the two 
women consoling each other, and with what strange 
eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching them 
from the window, come down across the years : 

"Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill 
each other ? . . . There it stands in the paper — two thousand 
more men — it writes itself so easily I But that every one of 
them has a wife or mother or sister or a — . . . And when 
they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory, and 
when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of 
the ' forces' — so and so many men — and nobody even knows 
his name. ..." 

You must imagine them coming back from the 
war, and pale, benign, leaning on their canes as re- 
turning heroes do in plays, talk across the footlights 
to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in 
with real wounds — pink-cheeked boys with heads and 
feet bandaged and Iron Crosses on black-and-white 
ribbons tucked into their coats, home from East 
Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you 
must imagine them pouring out to the refreshment- 
room for a look at each other and something to eat — 
will they never stop eating? — fathers and mothers and 
daughters with their Butterbrod and 'Schinken and big 
glasses of beer in the genial German fashion, beam- 

94 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

ing on the young heroes limping by or, with heads 
bandaged like schoolboys with mumps, grinning in 
spite of their scars. 

And when they drift out into the street at last, 
softened and brought together by the play — the 
street with its lights and flags, officers in long, blue- 
gray overcoats and soldiers everywhere, and a mili- 
tary automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay 
"Tartee! Ta-£d/" — the extras are out with another 
Russian army smashed and two more ships sunk in 
the Channel. The old newspaper woman at the 
Friedrichsstrasse corner is chanting it hoarsely, "Zwei 
englische Dampfer gesunken!" — and they read that "the 
sands have run, the prologue is spoken, the curtain 
risen on the tragedy of England's destiny." 

Great days, indeed! Days of achievement, of ut- 
ter sacrifice, and flinging all into the common cause. 
Round the corner from Unter den Linden, under the 
dark windows of the Information Bureau, you may 
see part of the price. It is still and deserted there, 
except for a lone woman with a shawl over her head, 
trying to read, by the light of the street-lamp, the 
casualty lists. You must imagine a building like the 
Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Audi- 
torium Hotel in Chicago, with a band of white paper, 
like newspapers, spread out and pasted end to end, 
running along one side, round the corner, and down 
the other. Not inches, but yards, rods, two city 
blocks almost, of microscopic type; columns of names, 
arranged in the systematic German way — lightly 

95 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

wounded, badly wounded — schwer verwundet — gefallen. 
Some have died of wounds — tot — some dead in the 
enemy's country — in Feindesland gefallen. Rank on 
rank, blurring off into nothingness, endless files of 
type, pale as if the souls of the dead were crowding 
here. 

One tried to think of the "Categorical Imperative" 
in a New York playhouse — of the desperate endeavor 
to make the young schoolmaster really look simple 
and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of 
Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost 
their sweet comfortableness by dressing like profes- 
sional manikins; how the piece might succeed with 
luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and 
how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate 
intelligence with which it was played — and watched 
— it was but part of the week's work. 

And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you 
might have seen a dozen such audiences in Berlin 
that night — and yet tourists generally speak of Berlin, 
compared with some of the German provincial cities, 
as a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad 
sculpture and Prussian arrogance. You might have 
seen them at the opera or symphony concerts, at 
Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we 
used to read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, 
sandwiches in hand, so that they might sit through a 
performance of "Peer Gynt," with the Grieg music, 
beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven. A 
wonderful night, with poetry and music and splen- 

96 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

did scenes and acting, and a man's very soul develop- 
ing before you all the time — sandwiches and beer and 
more music and poetry, until that tragedy of the 
egoist is no longer a play but a part of you, so many 
years of living, almost, added to one's life. Yes, it 
is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre shells 
— good music and good beer and good love of both; 
simplicity, homely kindness, and Gemutlichkeit. 

Mere talk about plays would not be much encour- 
aged in Germany nowadays. In one of the Cologne 
papers the other day there were two imaginary letters 
— one signed " One Who Means Well," asking that there 
be a little relief from war poems, war articles, and the 
like; and the other signed a One Who Means Better," 
demanding if it were possible for any German to 
waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Ger- 
manic peoples, in greater danger than in their entire 
history, stood with their back to the wall, facing and 
holding back the world. A Berlin dramatic critic, 
going through the motions of reviewing a new per- 
formance of "Hedda Gabler" the other morning, 
finally dismissed the matter as "Women's troubles — 
if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!" 
Yet a woman, asking at the same time that the "finer 
and sweeter voices of peaceful society" be not for- 
gotten, concluded her letter with "East and west the 
cannon thunder, but in men's souls sound many bells, 
and it is not necessary that they should always and 
forever be drowned out." 

I mention the theatre only as an easy illustration 

97 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

of that many-sided vitality one feels at once on en- 
tering Germany, that development of all a people's 
capabilities, material and spiritual, which is summed 
up, I suppose, in that hapless word Kultur. 

You may not like German learning or German art, 
and consider the one pedantic and the other heavy 
and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very feelingly 
the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a 
return to the old French culture, an escape from what 
he described as the German habit of accumulating 
mere facts to something that, in addition to feeding 
the brain, nourished the taste as well — carried with it, 
so to speak, a certain spiritual fragrance. 

You may be of this persuasion. The thing one 
cannot escape, however, in Germany, whether one 
likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality, the 
moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, 
whether it be applied to smashing forts or staging a 
play. When a people can hold back England and 
France with one hand and the Russian avalanche 
with the other, and, cut off from oversea trade and 
living on rations almost, yet, to take but one of the 
first examples, maintain the art of the theatre at a 
level which makes that of New York or London in the 
most spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, 
one is confronted with a fact which a reporter in his 
travels must record — a force which, as the saying 
goes, "must be reckoned with." 

So far as the special business of keeping the war 
going is concerned, this vitality, after seven months 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

of fighting, in spite of those lists in Dorotheenstrasse, 
seems ample. Here in Berlin, which is an all day's 
express journey from either front, you see thousands 
of fit young men marching through the streets, sing- 
ing and whistling; you are told of millions ready and 
waiting to go. Every one seems confident that Ger- 
many will win — indeed, with a unity and resolution 
which could scarcely be more complete if they were 
defending their last foot of territory, determined that 
Germany must win. 

When I was in London in the autumn a man who 
had made a flying trip to Berlin said that the German 
capital made him think of a man with his feet on the 
table smoking a cigar and pretending to be uncon- 
cerned although he knew all the time in his heart 
that he was doomed. I find little to suggest such a 
picture. The thing that at once impresses the stranger, 
along with the apparent reserve strength, is the moral 
earnestness behind that strength, the passionate con- 
viction that they are fighting a defensive fight, that 
they are right. I shall not attempt to explain this 
here, but merely record it as a fact. Possibly all people 
in all great wars believe they are right — and that is 
why there are great wars. 

Crossing the frontier from Rotterdam, I stopped 
for a day or two at Cologne. The proprietor of the 
hotel, a typical, big, hearty German of the commercial 
class, such as you might expect to find running a 
brewery at home or a bank or coffee plantation in 
South America, came out of his office when he heard 

99 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

English spoken. There are no " loose Englishmen" 
in Germany nowadays. 

"I suppose you are surprised to see the Dom, yes?" 
he laughed, pointing toward the cathedral towers in 
whose shadow we stood. And then — "What do you 
think about the war?" I asked him what he thought. 

"Well," he said, and with the air of brushing aside 
what was taken for granted before considering more 
doubtful issues, "of course we win !" 

He showed me a photograph of his son, just made 
an officer. "In a few weeks," he said, "maybe I volun- 
teer myself." He was fifty-five years old, but thor- 
oughly fit. He doubled up a big right arm and laugh- 
ingly gripped it. " Like iron ! " he boomed. " And there 
are five million men like me. Not men — soldiers!" 

I found myself the other evening, after zigzagging 
all over Berlin with an address given me at a type- 
writer agency, in a little apartment on the outskirts 
of the town. The woman who lived there had been 
a stenographer in the city until the war cut off her 
business, and she was now supporting herself with 
the six marks (one dollar and fifty cents) weekly war 
benefit given by the municipality and by making 
soldiers' shirts for the War Department at fifty pfen- 
nigs (twelve and one-half cents) a shirt. She was 
glad to get typewriting, and without words on either 
side at once got to work. So we proceeded for a page 
or two until something was said about an Iron Cross 
stuck inside a soldier's coat. 

"That is the Iron Cross of the second class," she 

100 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

interrupted; "they put that inside. The first class 
they wear outside/ ' and, as if she could keep still 
no longer, she suddenly flung out, almost without a 
pause : 

"My brother has the Iron Cross. I have seven 
brothers in the army. Three are in the east and three 
are in the west, and one is in the hospital. He was 
shot three times in the leg — here — and here — and 
here. They hope to save his leg, but he will always 
be lame. He got the Iron Cross. He was at Dix- 
mude. They marched up singing ' Deutschland ilber 
Alles.' They were all shot down. There were three 
hundred of them, and every one fell. They knew they 
must all be shot, but they marched on just the same, 
singing 'Deutschland ilber Alles.'' They knew they 
were going against the English, and nothing could 
stop them." 

Her brother would go back if he had to crawl back 
— if only she could go and not have to sit here and 
wait! . . . 

"I told you," she said, "when you first came in, 
that I was German. And I asked you if you were an 
American, because I know that dreadful things have 
been said in America about our Kaiser, and I will not 
have such things said to me. Our Kaiser did not want 
the war — he did everything he could to prevent the 
war — no ruler in the world ever did more for his people 
than our Kaiser has done, and there is not a man, 
woman, or child in Germany who would not fight for 
him." And this, you must remember, was from a 

101 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

woman whose support was cut off by the war and 
who was making a living by sewing shirts at twelve 
and a half cents a shirt. 

I walked down the busy High Street that night in 
Cologne, and the bright shop-windows with their 
chocolates and fruit — apples from Canada and Hood 
River — crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks 
into the narrow streets somehow reminded me of the 
cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through in November. 
There are, indeed, many French suggestions in Cologne, 
and in the shops they still sometimes call an umbrella 
a parapluie. 

An American who lives in Cologne told me that 
the decrease in the number of young men was notice- 
able, and that eleven sons of his friends had been 
killed. To a stranger the city looked normal, with 
the usual crowds. One did notice the people about 
the war bulletin-boards. They were not boys and 
street loungers, but grave-looking citizens and their 
wives and daughters, people who looked as if they 
might have sons or brothers at the front. 

The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through 
Essen, where the Krupp guns are made, the coal and 
iron country of Westphalia, and the plains of the 
west. It is a country of large cities whose borders 
often almost touch, where some tall factory chimney 
is almost always on the horizon. All these chimneys 
were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course, 
why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing 
going on — if not as usual, at any rate going on. 

102 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

The muddy plains between the factory towns were 
green with winter wheat ; the crop which is to carry 
the country through another year. Meanwhile, one 
was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, 
and land not needed for beets — for with no sugar 
going out Germany can produce more now than she 
needs — also be seeded to wheat. 

Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, 
but in the complex web of a modern city it is rather 
hard to tell just what that means. In ordinary times, 
for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million 
dollars' worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, 
of course, is not coming in now, yet butter seems to 
appear, and at a central place like the Victoria Cafe, 
at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichs- 
strasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or 
twelve and a half cents, which is but two and a half 
cents more than they cost before the war, and that 
includes a morning paper and a window from which 
to see Berlin going by. Even were Berlin, in a jour- 
nalistic sense, "starving," one presumes the cosmo- 
politans in the tea-rooms of the Kaiserhof or Adlon 
or Esplanade would still have their trays of fancy 
cakes to choose from and find no difficulty in getting 
plenty to eat at a — for them — not unreasonable price. 

For weeks white bread has had to contain a cer- 
tain amount of rye flour and rye bread a certain 
amount of potato — the so-called war bread — and, 
except in the better hotels, one was served, unless 
one ordered specially, with only two or three little 

103 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

wisps of this " Kriegsbrod." For Frenchmen this would 
mean a real privation, but Germans eat so little bread, 
comparatively speaking, that one believes the average 
person scarcely noticed the difference. Every one 
must have his bread-card now, with coupons entitling 
him to so many grams a day — about four pounds a 
week — which the waiter or baker tears off when the 
customer gets his bread. Without these cards not so 
much as a crumb can be had for love or money. Yet 
with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape your 
morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty 
pfennigs (seven and one-half cents) in one of the 
Berlin " automats" to one mark fifty pfennigs (thirty- 
seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels. 

Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and 
in any of the big, popular "beer restaurants," so com- 
mon in Berlin, an ordinary steak for one person costs 
from thirty-five to fifty cents. Pork, the mainstay 
of the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, be- 
cause hogs have been made into durable hard sausages 
for the army, and potatoes, also expensive, have been 
bought up in large quantities by the government, to 
be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds 
to each person, at a moderate price. There are said 
to be eight hundred thousand prisoners now in Ger- 
many, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has 
been made that the hordes of hungry Russians cap- 
tured in the east are more dangerous now than they 
were with guns in their hands. Yet there are no visible 
signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts 

104 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

of London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman 
in charge of one of the soup-kitchens where people 
pinched by the war get one substantial meal a day at 
ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one 
in Berlin going hungry. Meanwhile, the scarcity of 
flour only adds fuel to the people's patriotism, and 
they are told everywhere on red placards that Eng- 
land never can starve them out if every German does 
his economical duty. Where so much thinking is 
done for the people, and done so efficiently, it is dif- 
ficult not to feel that everything is somehow "ar- 
ranged," and one finds it difficult to become acutely 
anxious while the hundreds of crowded cafes are run- 
ning full blast until one o'clock every morning and 
the seal in the Tiergarten has the bottom of his tank 
covered with fresh fish he is too indolent to eat. 

"Society," in its more visible, decorative sense, is 
as forgotten as it is in France, as it must be in 
such a time. There are no dances or formal parties; 
every one who is not going about his civil business 
has in one way or another "gone to the war." The 
gay young men are at the front, the idle young women 
knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and it is an 
adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to 
meet on the street a pretty young lady merely out 
to take the air, with hands in her muff and trotting 
in front of her the timorous dachshund, muzzled like 
a ravening tiger and looking at the world askance 
with his rueful eyes. 

The apparent quietness and gravity is partially 

105 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

due to the lack of a "yellow" or, in the British or 
American sense of the word, popular press. There 
is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one's 
ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent 
neither the better-class English civilians nor the light- 
hearted fighting man at the front, yet which are enter- 
tainingly written, do contain the news, and get them- 
selves read. 

The German papers print comparatively little of 
what we call "news." They hide unpleasant truths 
and accent pleasant ones, and are working all the 
time to create a definite public opinion; but their 
partisanship is that of official proclamation rather 
than that of overworked and underpaid reporters 
striving to please their employers with all the des- 
peration of servants working for a tip. The yelping 
after spies, the heaping of adjectives on every tri- 
fling achievement of British arms, the ill-timed talk 
of snatching the enemy's trade in a war theoretically 
fought for a high principle, all that journalistic vul- 
garity — which might be as characteristic of our own 
papers under similar circumstances — one is mercifully 
spared. 

This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work 
of the men at the front. A few days ago flags were 
flung out all over Berlin at the news of Hindenburg's 
victory; military attaches were saying that there had 
been nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down 
the streets the newswomen were croaking: " Sechsund- 
zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen . . . Hindenburg zdhlt 

106 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

noch immer . . ." (" Twenty-six thousand Russians 
captured . . . and Hindenburg's still counting . . .")• 
And all you could find in the papers was the Gen- 
eral Staff report that "at one place the fighting has 
been very severe; up to the present we have made 
some twenty-six thousand prisoners," etc., and even 
this laconic sentence lost in the middle of the regular 
communique beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian 
coast, after a period of inactivity ..." 

The picturesqueness and personalities of the war 
are left to the stage and the innumerable weeklies 
and humorous papers, yet even here there is little 
or no tendency to group achievements around in- 
dividual commanders — it is "our army," not the man, 
although even German collectivism cannot keep Hin- 
denburg's dependable old face off the post-cards nor 
regiments of young ladies from sending him letters 
and Liebesgaben. 

In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dug- 
outs in Flanders or in Galician trenches; see the au- 
dience weep when the German mother sends off her 
seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest 
boy, schwer verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer 
when the curtain goes down on noble blond giants 
in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by 
the scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders 
to bite the dust. 

You may even see a submarine dive down into 
green water, see the torpedo slid into the tube, breech- 
block closed, and — "Now— for Kaiser and fatherland ! " 

107 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

— by means of an image thrown on a screen from the 
periscope ; see the English cruiser go up in a tower of 
water and founder. 

In all this comment there is a very different feeling 
for each of the three allies. The Russians "don't 
count/ ' so to speak. They are dangerous because 
of their numbers and must be flung back, but the 
feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd 
of stampeded range cattle. 

Toward the French there is no bitterness either, 
rather a sort of pity and the wish to be thought well 
of. One is reminded now and then of the German 
captain quartered at Sedan, in Zola's " Debacle," who, 
while conscious of the strength behind him, yet wanted 
his involuntary hosts to know that he, too, had been 
to Paris and knew how to be a galant homme. Men 
tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, / say !" 
or speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to 
go on with his work in the prison camp at Zossen, or 
the flower-beds in front of the French barracks there 
— "but, of course, the French are an artistic people. 
You can allow them liberties like that." Every now 
and then in the papers one runs across some anecdote 
from France in which the Frenchman is permitted to 
make the retort at the expense of the English. 

Toward John Bull there is no mercy. He is shown 
naked, trying to hide himself with neutral flags; he 
is sprawled in his mill with a river of French blood 
flowing by from the battle-fields of France, while the 
cartoonist asks France if she cannot see that she is 

108 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

doing his grinding for him; he is hobnobbing cheek 
by jowl with cannibals and black men, and he is 
seriously discussed as a traitor to the Germanic peo- 
ples and the white race. 

A German woman told me the other day that in 
her house it was the custom to fine everybody in the 
family ten pfennigs if they came down to breakfast 
without saying: "Gott strafe die Englander!" ("God 
punish the English ! ") In a recent Ulk there is a 
cartoon of a young mother holding up her baby to 
his proud father with the announcement that he has 
spoken his first words. "And what did he say?" 
"Gott strafe England!" 

America is criticised for supplying the Allies with 
arms — shades of South American revolutions and the 
old " Ypiranga" ! — while permitting itself, without suf- 
ficient protest, to be shut off from sending food to 
Germany. Yet, in spite of this and the extremely 
difficult situation created by the submarine blockade, 
the individual American is not embarrassed unless 
mistaken for an Englishman or unless he finds some 
supersensitive patriot in a restaurant or theatre who 
objects even to hearing English. 

At the frontier the honest customs inspector landed, 
first thing, on a copy of "Tartarin sur les Alpes," 
which I had picked up at the railroad news-stand in 
the Hague. 

"Franzosisch!" he declared, flapping over the pages. 
Next it was a bundle of letters of introduction, the 
top one of which happened to be in English. "Eng- 

109 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

lische Brief e!" and forthwith he bellowed for help. 
A young officer sauntered out from the near-by office, 
saluted, and said, "Good morning!" glanced at "Tar- 
tarin" with a smile, and tossed it back into the bag, 
at letters and passport, said it must be very interest- 
ing to see both sides, and so, after a question or two, 
to the train for Koln. 

On the way to Berlin from Koln, that rainy after- 
noon, I went into the dining-car toward five o'clock 
attired in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit and heavy 
tan boots, and, speaking German with evident pain, 
tactfully asked — everybody else drinking beer — for tea. 
The man across the way whispered to his compan- 
ion and stared; a middle-aged man farther up the 
aisle stood stock-still and stared; a young woman at 
the other end of the car turned round and, gazing 
over the back of her chair, whispered aghast to her 
companion : " Engldnder!" 

Not particularly enlivened by the cup that cheers, 
I regained my compartment presently and glared out 
at the sodden landscape, with now and then a shot at 
the other occupant who had got on at Essen or one of 
the western stations and sat the day out without a 
word. One of those disagreeable Prussians evidently 
— until, actually needing to know, I broke the silence 
by asking which station we arrived at in Berlin. He 
answered with perfect good humor, and we began to 
talk. I mentioned the tea incident. 

"Ignorant people!" he said, dismissing them with 
a wave of the hand. They ought to have seen my 

110 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

little flag — he had — and, anyhow, a gentleman was a 
gentleman, and they were fighting England, not in- 
dividual Englishmen. Then, reverting to my apologies 
for my German, he amiably shifted into French, and 
so we talked until reaching Berlin, when, hoping that 
I would get what I came for, he shook hands and 
wished me "Bon voyage!" So you never can tell. 

The militarism which any man in the street-car at 
home can tell you all about, and which Cramb and 
Bernhardi make so interesting and understandable, 
is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on. 
Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you 
might talk with every man you meet for a fortnight 
without finding any one who could tell you — as any 
young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner 
can tell you at home — about the German belief in 
war as a great blessing, because it is the only way of 
asserting your own superior ideas over the other 
man's inferior ideas, and thus getting a world ahead. 

People want to smash England, of course, because, 
as they explain, she brought on the war and is try- 
ing to starve them, and they roar with the applause 
when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten 
impersonates Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a 
grand old scout who is keeping those millions of slov- 
enly Russians from overrunning our tidy, busy, well- 
ordered Germany. But Treitschke — who was he? 

And then, of course, it is not always easy to put 
one's finger on just what people mean by militarism. 
Some have objected to militarism because they didn't 

111 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

like the manners of the German waiters at the Savoy, 
and some because — "Well, those people somehow rub 
you the wrong way!" It is not universal conscrip- 
tion, because many nations have that, nor the amount 
spent per capita on soldiers and ships, for we our- 
selves spend almost as much as the Germans, and 
the French even more. 

One of our old-school cattlemen, used to shooting 
all the game, cutting all the timber, and using all the 
water he wanted to, would doubtless say, without 
seeing a soldier, that it was "their damned police !" 
No, when people think they are talking about Ger- 
man militarism, they are quite as likely to be talk- 
ing about the way German faces are made or about 
German collectivism — the uncanny ability Germans 
have for taking orders, for team-work, for turning 
every individual energy into the common end. 

One may, however, run across a certain feeling 
toward war, quite local and unconscious, yet very 
different from the French love of "gloire" and the 
English keenness for war as a sort of superior fox- 
hunting or football. You are, let us say, watching 
one of the musical comedies which the war has in- 
spired. 

The curtain rises on a darkened stage, through 
whose blackness you presently discover, twinkling 
far below, as if you were looking down from an aero- 
plane, the lights of Paris, the silver thread of the 
Seine and its bridges. There is a faint whirring, and 
two faces emerge vaguely from the dark — the hero 

112 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

and heroine swinging along in a Taube. And as they 
fly they sing a wistful little waltz song, a sort of cradle 
song: 

"Ich glau-u-be . . . Ich glau-u-be 
Da oben fliegt . . . 'ne Taube . . ." 

They are thinking, so the song runs, that there is 
a Taube overhead; it has flown here out of its German 
nest, and let's hope it will not let anything fall on 
them. And, as they sing, the young man makes a 
motion with his hand, there is a sort of glowworm 
flash, and a few seconds later, away down there among 
the Paris roofs a puff of red smoke and fire. The il- 
lusion is perfect, and the audience is enchanted — that 
ride through the velvet night, so still, so quaint, so 
roguish in its way, and the flash far below, that has 
flung some unsuspecting citizen on the cobblestones 
like a bundle of old rags. 

And, whirring gently, the Taube sails on through 
the night: 

"Ich glaube . . . Ich glaube 
Da oben fliegt . . . 'ne Taube . . ." 

Again the glowworm flash, and a moment later, 
over on the left bank, not far from the Luxembourg, 
apparently, another of those eloquent little puffs of 
fire. The crowd is as delighted as children would be 
with bursting soap-bubbles. 

Or we are, let us say, at "Woran Wir Denken" 
("What We're Thinking Of") with delightful music 

113 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

and such verses as we rarely enough hear in musical 
comedies at home. In the spotlight there is a square 
young man dressed in a metallic coat and conical 
helmet, so as to suggest the famous forty-two-centi- 
metre shell — the shell which makes a hole like a cellar 
and smashed the Belgian forts as if an earthquake 
had struck them. And singing with him an exquisite, 
nun-like creature in a dove-colored robe, typifying the 
Taube. 
They are singing to each other: 

" / am delicate and slender 
And made for the salon . . ." 

" And I am the biggest smasher 
In all the present season ..." 

" High up above the clouds 
I fly at heart's desire . . ." 

" And Fm a child of Krupp's, 
Whom nobody knew about . . ." 

" J fly j trackless as a breath . . " 

" I slash on with smoke and roar . . ." 

They are in love with each other, you see, the Taube 
and the forty-two-centimetre shell, the "Brummer" or 
"Grumbler," as they call it in Germany — could anything 
be more piquant ? You should hear them — the chaste, 
chic, nun-like Taube and the thick-chested old Brum- 

114 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

mer, singing that he is her dear old Grumbler and she 
his soft, swift Dove: 

" Siisser, dicker Brummer . . . 
Du mein Taubchen, zart und flink . . . 

There is a sort of poetry about this — a new sort 
of poetry about a new sort of war. And it might 
possibly be proved that such poetry could only come 
from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, 
even in imagination, from the uses to which arms 
must be put — a people in love with war, having a 
mystical feeling for its instruments, such as their re- 
mote ancestors had for their battle-axes and double- 
edged swords. 

I shall not attempt to do this— heaven preserve 
Americans from being judged by their musical come- 
dies! — and doubtless the children even of our most 
devoted advocates of universal peace have played with 
lead cannon and toy soldiers. I merely speak of it, 
this curious mixture of refinement and brutality, as 
something which, it struck me, we Americans — who 
always do everything exactly right — would not have 
thought of doing in just that way. 

Many of the ways of this people are not our ways. 
You have heard, let us say, of the German parade 
step, sometimes laughed at as the "goose step" in 
England and at home. I was lunching the other day 
with an American military observer, and he spoke of 
the parade step and the effect it had on him. 

"Did you ever see it?" he demanded. "Have you 

115 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

any idea of the moral effect of that step? You see 
those men marching by, every muscle in their bodies 
taut and tingling as steel wire, every eye on the Em- 
peror, and when they bring those feet down — bing! 
bang! — the physical fitness it stands for, the unity, 
determination — why, it's the whole German idea — 
nothing can stop 'em!" 

"Did you ever see one of these soldiers salute?" 
Yes, I had seen hundreds of them, and I had been 
made extremely ill at ease one day in my hotel when 
a young officer with whom I had started, in the Amer- 
ican fashion, comfortably to shake hands suddenly 
whacked his heels together like a couple of Indian 
clubs and, stiff as a ramrod, snapped his hand to his 
cap. 

"Did you ever see them salute? They don't do it 
like a baggage porter — there's nothing servile about 
it. They square off and bring that hand to their 
heads and look that officer square in the eyes as if to 
say : ' Now, damn you, salute me ! ' And he gets his 
salute, too — like a man!" 

You may not like this salute or you may not like 
the parade step, but you can be very sure of one 
thing — that it is not the militarism that pushes civil- 
ians off the sidewalk nor permits an officer to strike 
his subordinate — though these things have happened 
in Germany — that is holding back England and 
France and driving the Russian millions out of East 
Prussia. It is something bigger than that. Peasants 
and princes, these men are dying gladly, backed up 

116 



"THE GREAT DAYS" 

by fitness, discipline, and a passionate unity such as 
the world has not often seen. This, and not the futile 
nurses' tales with which the American public permitted 
itself to be diverted during the early weeks of the war, 
is what strikes one in Germany. It is a fact, like the 
Germans being in Belgium, which you have got to 
face and think about, whether you like it or not. 
Berlin, February, 1915. 



117 



VII 

TWO GERMAN PRISON CAMPS 

Visiting a prison camp is somewhat like touching 
at an island in the night — one of those tropical islands, 
for instance, whose curious and crowded life shows 
for an instant as your steamer leaves the mail or takes 
on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a 
few twinkling lights and the sound of a bell across 
the water. You may get permission to see a prison 
camp, but may not stay there, and you are not ex- 
pected, generally, to talk to the prisoners. You can 
but walk past those rows of eyes, with all their untold 
stories, much as you might go into a theatre in the 
midst of a performance, tramp through the audience 
and out again. 

It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that 
somebody — some German shut away in the south of 
France, one of those quick-eyed Frenchmen in the 
human zoo at Zossen — is keeping a diary. 

For while there have always been prison camps, 
have there ever been — at least, since Rome — such 
menageries as these! Behind the barbed-wire fence 
at Zossen — Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin — 
there are some fifteen thousand men. The greater 
number are Frenchmen, droves of those long blue 

118 



TWO GERMAN PRISON CAMPS 

turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing slug- 
gishly between the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen 
of every sort of training and temperament, swept 
here like dust by the war into common anonymity. 

I do not remember any picture of the war more 
curious, and, as it were, uncanny than the first sight 
of Zossen as our motor came lurching down the muddy 
road from Berlin — that huge, forgotten eddy, that 
slough of idle, aimless human beings against the gray 
March sky, milling slowly round and round in the 
mud. 

But the French are only part of Zossen. There are 
Russians — shaggy peasants such as we see in cartoons 
or plays at home, and Mongol Russians with flat 
faces and almond eyes, who might pass for China- 
men. There are wild-eyed "Turcos" from the French 
African provinces, chattering untamed Arabs play- 
ing leap-frog in front of their German commandant 
as impudently as street boys back in their native 
bazaars. There are all the tribes and castes of British 
Indians — "I've got twenty different kinds of people 
in my Mohammedan camp," said the lieutenant who 
was showing me about — squat Gurkhas from the 
Himalayas, minus their famous knives — tall, black- 
bearded Sikhs, with the faces of princes. There are 
even a few lone Englishmen, though most of the 
British soldiers in this part of Germany are at 
Doberitz. Whether or not Zossen could be called a 
"show" camp, it seemed, at any rate, about as well 
managed as such a place could be. The prisoners 

119 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

were housed in new, clean, one-story barracks; well 
fed, so far as one could tell from their appearance and 
that of the kitchens and storerooms; they could write 
and be written to, and they were compelled to take 
exercise. The Roman Catholics had one chapel and 
the Greek Catholics another, and there was an effort 
to permit Indian prisoners to observe their rules of 
caste. 

As we tramped through barracks where chilly In- 
dians, Russians with broad, high cheek-bones, sensi- 
tive-looking Frenchmen with quick, liquid eyes, 
jumped to their feet and stiffened at attention as the 
commandant passed, a young officer, who had lived in 
England before the war and was now acting as in- 
terpreter, volunteered his guileless impressions. The 
Turcos were a bad lot — fighting, gambling, and steal- 
ing from each other — there was trouble with some of 
them every day. The Russians were dirty, good- 
natured, and stupid. 

The English — well, frankly, he was surprised at 
their lack of discipline and general unruliness — all 
except some of the Indians, and those, he must say, 
were well-trained — fine fellows and good soldiers. 
One could surmise the workings of his mind as one 
thought of the average happy-go-lucky Tommy At- 
kins, and then came across one of those tall, straight, 
hawk-eyed Sikhs and saw him snap his heels together 
and his arms to his sides and stand there like a bronze 
statue. 

It was a dreadful job getting the Frenchmen to 

120 



TWO GERMAN PRISON CAMPS 

take exercise — "they canH un-der-stand why any one 
should want to work, merely to keep himself fit!" 
Aside from this idiosyncrasy they were, of course, the 
pleasantest sort of people to get along with. 

We saw Frenchmen sorting mail in the post-office, 
painting signs for streets, making blankets out of 
pasted-together newspapers — everywhere they were 
treated as intelligent men to whom favors could be 
granted. And, of course, there was this difference 
between the French and English of the early weeks 
of the war — the French army is one of universal con- 
scription like the German, and business men and 
farmers, writers, singers, and painters were lumped 
in together. There was one particularly good-looking 
young man, a medical officer, who flung up his head 
to attention as we came up. 

"He helped us a lot — this man!" said the com- 
mandant, and laid his hand on the young man's 
shoulder. The Frenchman's eyes dilated a trifle and 
a smile flashed behind rather than across his face — 
one could not know whether it was gratitude or de- 
fiance. 

A sculptor who had won a prize at Rome and sev- 
eral other artists had had a room set aside for them 
to work in. Some were making post-cards, some 
more ambitious drawings, and in the sculptor's 
studio was the head of the young doctor we had just 
seen and an unfinished plaster group for a camp 
monument. On the wall was a sign in Latin and 
French — "Unhappy the spirit which worries about 

121 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

the future/ ' a facetious warning that any one who 
loafed there longer than three minutes was likely to 
be killed, and the following artistic creed from "La 
Fontaine:" 

" Ne forcons point notre talent, 
" Nous ne ferions rien avec gr&ce; 
" Jamais un lourdaud quoiqu'il fosse 
" Ne saurait passer pour galant." 

("Don't strain your talent or you'll do nothing gracefully. 
The boor won't pass for a gallant gentleman, no matter what 
he does.") 

The Germans, at different times in their history, 
have conquered the French and humbly looked up 
to and imitated them. Generally speaking, they 
study and try to understand the French, and their 
own intellectuality and idealism are things French- 
men might be expected to like or, at any rate, be in- 
terested in. Yet it is one of history's or geography's 
ironies that the Frenchman goes on his way, neither 
knowing nor wanting to know the blond beasts over 
the Rhine — "Jamais un lourdaud quoiqu'il fasse" . . . 
the young sculptor must have smiled when he tacked 
that verse on the wall of his prison ! 

Ruhleben is a race-track on the outskirts of Berlin, 
and a detention camp for English civilians. This is 
quite another sort of menagerie. You can imagine 
the different kinds of Englishmen who would be caught 
in Germany by the storm — luxurious invalids taking 

122 



TWO GERMAN PRISON CAMPS 

the waters at Baden-Baden; Gold Coast negro roust- 
abouts from rusty British tramps at Hamburg; agents, 
manufacturers, professors, librarians, officers from 
Channel boats, students of music and philosophy. 

All these luckless civilians — four thousand of them 
— had been herded together in the stables, paddock, 
and stands of the Ruhleben track. The place was 
not as suited for a prison as the high land of Zossen, 
the stalls with their four bunks were dismal enough, 
and the lofts overhead, with little light and ventila- 
tion, still worse. 

Some had suffered, semi-invalids, for instance, un- 
able to get along with the prison rations, but the in- 
teresting thing about Ruhleben was not its discomfort, 
but the remarkable fashion in which the prisoners had 
contrived to make the best of a bad matter. 

The musicians had their instruments sent in and 
organized an orchestra. The professors began to 
lecture and teach until now there was a sort of uni- 
versity, with some fifty different classes in the long 
room under the grand stand. And on the evening 
when we had the privilege of visiting Ruhleben it was 
to see a dramatic society present Bernard Shaw's 
"Androcles and the Lion." 

The play began at six o'clock, for the camp lights 
are out at nine, and it was in the dusk of another 
one of Berlin's rainy days, after slithering through 
the Tiergarten and past the endless concrete apart- 
ment-houses of Charlottenburg, that our taxicab 
swung to the right, lurched down the lane of mud, 

123 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

and stopped at the gate of Ruhleben. Inside was a 
sort of mild morass, overspread with Englishmen— 
professional-looking men with months-old beards, 
pink-cheeked young fellows as fresh as if they had 
just stepped off Piccadilly, men in faded knicker- 
bockers and puttees, men in sailor blue and brass but- 
tons, men with flat caps and cockney accent, one with 
a Thermos bottle, and crisp "Right you are!" — a 
good-natured, half-humorous, half-tragic cross-section 
of the London streets, drifting about here in the Ger- 
man mud. 

There were still a few minutes before the play be- 
gan, and we walked through some of the barracks 
with the commandant, a tall, bronzed officer of middle 
age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian 
Germans who resemble their English cousins of the 
same class. Each barrack had its captain, and over 
these was a camp-captain— -formerly an English mer- 
chant of Berlin — who went with us on our rounds. 

The stables were crowded with bunks and men — 
like a cattleship forecastle. One young man, fulfilling 
doubtless his English ritual of " dressing for dinner," 
was punctiliously shaving, although it was now prac- 
tically dark; in another corner the devotee of some 
system of how to get strong and how to stay so, 
stripped to the skin, was slowly and with solemn pre- 
cision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells. 

Some saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed 
almost as to a friend, with a cheery "Guten Abend, 
Herr Baron!" There seemed, indeed, to be a very 

124 



TWO GERMAN PRISON CAMPS 

pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and 
his gentlemen prisoners, and the camp-captain ; lagging 
behind, told how one evening when they had sung 
"Elijah," the men had stood up and given three Eng- 
lish cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who 
had come to hear the performance, stood beside him 
laughing and wiping her eyes. 

As you get closer to war you more frequently run 
across such things. The fighting men kill ruthlessly, 
because that, they think, is the way to get their busi- 
ness over. But for the most part they kill without 
hate. For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms, 
you must go back to the men who are not fighting, to 
the overdriven and underexercised journalists, sizzling 
and thundering in their swivel-chairs. 

The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already 
crowded as we were led to our seats on a rostrum fac- 
ing the stage with the commandant and one of his 
officers. There was a red draw curtain, footlights 
made with candles and biscuit tins, and so strung on 
a wire that at a pull, between the acts, they could be 
turned on the spectators. A programme had been 
printed on the camp mimeograph, the camp orchestra 
was tuning up, and a special overture had been com- 
posed by a young gentleman with the beautiful name 
of "Quentin Morvaren." 

You will doubtless recall Mr. Shaw's comedy, and 
the characteristic "realistic" fun he has with his 
Romans and Christian martyrs, and the lion who, re- 
membering the mild-mannered Androcles, who had 

125 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

once pulled a sliver from his foot, danced out of the 
arena with him instead of eating him. And you can 
imagine the peculiarly piquant eloquence given to the 
dialogue between Mr. Shaw's meek but witty Chris- 
tians and their might-is-right Roman captors ; spoken 
by British prisoners in the spring of 1915, in a German 
prison camp before a German commandant sitting up 
like a statue with his hands on his sword ! 

The Roman captain was a writer, the centurion a 
manufacturer, Androcles a teacher of some sort, the 
call-boy for the fights in the arena a cabin-boy from a 
British merchant ship, and the tender-hearted lion 
some genius from the "halls." Even after months of 
this sodden camp it was possible to find a youth to 
play Lavinia, with so pretty a face, such a velvet 
voice, such a pensive womanliness that the flat-capped, 
ribald young cockneys in the front row blushed with 
embarrassment. A professor of archseology, or some- 
thing, said that he had never seen more accurate re- 
productions of armor, though this was made but of 
gilded and silvered cardboard — in short, if Mr. Shaw's 
fun was ever better brought out by professional play- 
ers, they must have been very good indeed. 

It was an island within an island that night, there 
under the Ruhleben grand stand — English speech and 
Irish wit in that German sea. You should have seen 
the two young patricians drifting in, with the regula- 
tion drawl of the Piccadilly "nut"— "I say! He-ah's 
some Christians— let's chaff them!" The crowd was 
laughing, the commandant was laughing, the curtain 

126 



TWO GERMAN PRISON CAMPS 

closed in a whirl of applause, one had forgotten there 
was a war. The applause continued, the players 
straggled out, faltering back from the parts in which 
they had forgotten themselves into normal, self-con- 
scious Englishmen. There was a moment's embar- 
rassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall 
man in gray-blue rose to his feet. 

"Danke Ihnen, meine Herren! Aeusserst nett!" he 
said briskly. (" Thanks, gentlemen! Very clever in- 
deed!") He turned to us, nodded in stiff soldierly 
fashion. "Sehr nett! Sehr nett!" he said, and led 
the way out between a lane of Englishmen suddenly 
become prisoners again. 



127 



VIII 

IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES AT LA BASSEE 

We had come down from Berlin on one of those ex- 
cursions which the German General Staff arranges for 
the military observers and correspondents of neutral 
countries. You go out, a sort of zoo — our party in- 
cluded four or five Americans, a Greek, an Italian, a 
diminutive Spaniard, and a tall, preoccupied Swede — 
under the direction of some hapless officer of the Gen- 
eral Staff. For a week, perhaps, you go hurtling 
through a closely articulated programme almost as 
personally helpless as a package in a pneumatic tube 
— night expresses, racing military motors, snap-shots 
at this and that, down a bewildering vista of long gray 
capes, heel clickings, stiff bows from the waist, and 
military salutes. You are under fire one minute, the 
next shooting through some captured palace or bar- 
racks or museum of antiques. At noon the guard is 
turned out in your honor; at four you are watching 
distant shell-fire from the Belgian dunes; at eleven, 
crawling under a down quilt in some French hotel, 
where the prices of food and wines are fixed by the 
local German commandant. Everything is done for 
you — more, of course, than one would wish — the gifted 
young captain-conductor speaks English one minute, 

128 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

French or Italian the next, gets you up in the morn- 
ing, to bed at night, past countless sentries and thick- 
headed guards demanding an Ausweis, contrives never 
to cease looking as if he had stepped from a band- 
box, and presently pops you into your hotel in Berlin 
with the curious feeling of never having been away 
at all. 

It isn't, of course, an ideal way of working — not like 
putting on a hat and strolling out to war, as one some- 
times could do in the early weeks in Belgium and 
France. The front is a big and rather accidental 
place, however — you can scarcely touch it anywhere 
without bringing back something to help complete the 
civilian's puzzle picture of the war. Our moment 
came in the German trenches before La Bass6e, when, 
with the English so near that you could have thrown 
a baseball into their trenches, both sides began to toss 
dynamite bombs at each other. 

We had come across to Cologne on the regular night 
express, shifted to a military train, and so on through 
Aix, Louvain, Brussels, and by the next morning's 
train down to Lille. Armentieres was only eight miles 
away, Ypres fifteen, and a little way to the south 
Neuve Chapelle, where the English offensive had first 
succeeded, then been thrown back only a few days 
before. 

Spring had come over night, the country was green, 
sparkling with canals and little streams, and the few 
Belgian peasants left were trying to put it in shape for 
summer. A few were ploughing with horses, others 

129 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

laboriously going over their fields, foot by foot, with 
a spade; once we passed half a dozen men dragging a 
harrow. Every tree in this country, where wood is 
grown like any other crop, was speckled with white 
spots where branches had been trimmed away, and 
below the timber was piled — heavy logs for lumber, 
smaller ones cut into firewood — the very twigs piled 
as carefully as so many stacks of celery. 

So fresh and neat and clean-swept did it seem in 
that soft sunshine that one forgot how empty it was 
— so empty and repressed that one awoke startled to 
see three shaggy farm horses galloping off as the train 
rolled by, kicking up their heels as if they never had 
heard of war. It seemed frivolous, almost imperti- 
nent, and the landsturm officer, leaning in the open 
window beside me in the passageway, thinking per- 
haps of his own home across the Rhine, laughed and 
breathed a deep-chested "Kohssal!" 

We passed Enghien, Leuze, Tournai, all with that 
curious look of a run-down clock. On the outskirts of 
one town, half a dozen little children stopped spinning 
tops in the road to demand tribute from the train. 
They were pinched little children, with the worried, 
prematurely old faces of factory children, and they 
begged insistently, almost irritably, as if payment was 
long overdue. Good-natured soldiers tossed them 
chocolate and sausage and slices of buttered Kriegs- 
brod, which they took without thanks, still repeating 
in a curious jumble of German and French, "Pfennig 
venir! Pfennig — Pfennig — Pfennig venir!" 

130 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

Two officers from division headquarters were wait- 
ing for us in the station at Lille — one, a tall, easy-going 
young fellow in black motor-gauntlets, who looked as 
if he might, a few years before, have rowed on some 
American college crew; the other, in the officers' gray- 
blue frock overcoat with fur collar, a softer type, with 
quick, dark eyes and smile, and the pleasant, slightly 
languid manners of a young legation secretary. 

We had just time to glance at the broken windows 
in the station roof, the two or three smashed blocks 
around it, and be hurried to that most empty of places 
— a modern city hotel without any guests — when three 
gray military motor-cars, with the imperial double 
eagle in black on their sides, whirled up. The officers 
took the lead, our happy family distributed itself in 
the others, and with cut-outs dmmming, a soldier be- 
side each chauffeur blowing a warning, and an occa- 
sional gay "Ta-ta ta-ta!" on a silver horn, we whirled 
out into the open country. 

We passed a church with a roof smashed by an 
aeroplane a few days before — and caught at the same 
time the first "B-r-r-rurm!" from the cannonading to 
the west — a supply-train, an overturned motor-van, 
and here and there packed ammunition wagons and 
guns. Presently, in the lee of a little brick farmhouse 
a short distance from the village of Aubers, we alighted, 
and, with warnings that it was better not to keep too 
close together, walked a little farther down the road. 
Not a man was in sight, nor a house, nor gun, not even 
a trench, yet we were, as a matter of fact, in the mid- 
131 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

die of a battle-field. From where we stood it was not 
more than a mile to the English trenches and only 
two miles to Neuve Chapelle; and even as we stood 
there, from behind us, from a battery we had passed 
without seeing, came a crash and then the long spin- 
ning roar of something milling down aisles of air, and 
a far-off detonation from the direction of Neuve Cha- 
pelle. Tssee-ee-rr . . . Bong! over* our heads from 
the British lines came an answering wail, and in the 
field, a quarter of a mile beyond us, there was a geyser 
of earth, and slowly floating away a greenish-yellow 
cloud of smoke. From all over the horizon came the 
wail and crash of shells — an " artillery duel," as the 
official reports call it, the sort of thing that goes on 
day after day. 

Somebody wanted to walk on to the desolate vil- 
lage which raised its smashed walls a few hundred 
yards down the road. The tall young officer said that 
this might not be done — it would draw the enemy's 
fire, and as if to accent this advice there was a sudden 
Bang ! and the corner of one of the houses we were 
looking at collapsed in a cloud of dust. 

Under these wailing parabolas, swinging invisibly 
across from horizon to horizon, we withdrew behind 
the farmhouse for lunch — sandwiches, frankfurters 
kept hot in a fireless cooker, and red wine — when far 
overhead a double-decker English aeroplane suddenly 
sailed over us. It seemed to be about six thousand 
feet above us, so high that the sound of its motors 
was lost, and its speed seemed but a lazy, level drifting 

132 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

across the blue. Did it take those three motor-cars 
and those little dots for some reconnoitring division 
commander and his staff? Aeroplanes not only drop 
bombs, but signal to their friends; there was an un- 
comfortable amount of artillery scattered about the 
country, and we watched with peculiar interest the 
movements of this tiny hawk. 

But already other guns, as hidden as those that 
might be threatening us, had come, as it were, to the 
rescue. A little ball of black smoke suddenly puffed 
out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp 
crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our 
ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, 
above, below. They chased round him like swallows. 
In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is 
nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty as this. 

Our bird and his pursuers disappeared in the north; 
over the level country to the south floated a German 
observation balloon, and presently we rumbled over a 
canal and through the shattered village of La Bassee. 
La Bassee had been in the war despatches for months, 
and looked it. Its church, used as a range-finder, ap- 
parently, was a gray honeycomb from which each day 
a few shells took another bite. Roofs were torn off, 
streets strewn with broken glass and brick; yet it is 
in such houses and their cellars that soldiers fighting 
in the trenches in a neighborhood like this come back 
for a rest, dismal little islands which mask the armies 
one does not see at the front. 

The custom of billeting soldiers in houses — possible 

133 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

in territory so closely built up — adds to the vagueness 
of modern warfare. Americans associate armies with 
tents. When we mobilized ten thousand men at San 
Antonio, you were in a city of soldiers. Ten thousand 
men in this war disappear like water in sand. Some 
of them are in the trenches, some in villages like this, 
out of the zone of heavier fire, but within a few minutes' 
walk of their work, so to speak. Others are distrib- 
uted farther back, over a zone perhaps ten miles deep, 
crisscrossed with telephone-wires, and so arranged with 
assembling stations, reserves, and subreserves that the 
whole is a closely knit organism all the way up to the 
front. There is continual movement in this body — 
the men in the trenches go back after forty-eight hours 
to the near-by village, after days or weeks of this ser- 
vice, back clear out of the zone of fire; fresh men come 
up to take their places, and so on. All you see as you 
whirl through is a sentry here, a soldier's head there 
at a second-story window, a company shuffling along 
a country road. 

Women watched us from the doors of La Bassee — 
still going on living here, somehow, as human beings 
will on the volcano's very edge — and children were 
playing in the street. Husbands gone, food gone, the 
country swept bare — why did they not go, too? But 
where? Here, at any rate, there was a roof overhead 
— until a shell smashed it — and food soldiers were glad 
to share. There must be strange stories to tell of 
these little islands on the edge of the battle, where 
the soldiers who are going out to be killed, and the 

134 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

women whose husbands, perhaps, are going to help 
kill them, huddle together for a time, victims of a 
common storm. 

We whirled past them down the road a bit, then 
walked up a gentle slope to the right. Over this low 
ridge, from the English trenches, rifle-bullets whistled 
above our heads. In the shelter of a brick farmhouse 
a dozen or so German soldiers were waiting, after trench 
service, to go back to La Bassee. They were smallish, 
mild-looking men, dusted with the yellow clay in which 
they had burrowed — clothes, boots, faces, and hands — 
until they looked like millers. 

"How are the English?" some one asked. "Do 
they know how to shoot?" A weary sort of hoot 
chorused out from the dust-covered men. 

"Gut genug!" they said. 

The house was strewn with rusty cartridge clips and 
smashed brick. We waited while our chaperon brought 
the battalion commander — a mild-faced little man, 
more like a school-teacher than a soldier — and it was 
decided that, as the trenches were not under fire at 
the moment, we might go into them. He led the way 
into the communication trench — a straight-sided wind- 
ing ditch, shoulder-deep, and just wide enough to walk 
in comfortably. Yellow clay was piled up overhead 
on either side, and there was a wooden sidewalk. The 
ditch twisted constantly as the trenches themselves do, 
so as not to be swept by enfilading fire, and after some 
hundreds of yards of this twisting, we came to the 
first-line trench and the men's dugouts 

135 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

It was really a series of little caves, with walls of 
solid earth and roofs of timber and sand-bags, proof 
against almost anything but the plunging flight of 
heavy high-explosive shells. The floors of these caves 
were higher than the bottom of the trench, so that an 
ordinary rain would not flood them, and covered with 
straw. And they were full of men, asleep, working 
over this and that — from one came the smell of frying 
ham. The trench twisted snakelike in a general 
north and south direction, and was fitted every few 
feet with metal firing-shields, loopholed for rifles and 
machine guns. In each outer curve facing the enemy 
a firing platform, about waist-high, had been cut in 
the earth, with similar armored port-holes. 

The Germans had been holding this trench for three 
months, and its whole outer surface was frosted a sul- 
phurous yellow from the smoke of exploded shells. 
Shrapnel-casings and rusted shell-noses were sticking 
everywhere in the clay, and each curve exposing a bit 
of surface to the enemy was honeycombed with bullet 
holes. In one or two places sand-bags, caves, and all 
had been torn out. 

Except for an occasional far-off detonation and the 
more or less constant and, so to speak, absent-minded 
cracking of rifles, a mere keeping awake, apparently, 
and letting the men in the opposite trenches know you 
are awake, the afternoon was peaceful. Pink-cheeked 
youngsters in dusty Feldgrau, stiffened and clapped 
their hands to their sides as officers came in sight, 
heard English with an amazement not difficult to 

136 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

imagine, and doubtless were as anxious to talk to 
these strange beings from a world they'd said good-by 
to, as we were to talk to them. 

At one of the salient angles, where a platform had 
been cut, we stopped to look through a periscope: 
one cannot show head or hand above the trench, of 
course, without drawing fire, and looks out of this 
curious shut-in world as men do in a submarine — just 
as the lady in the old-fashioned house across from us 
in New York sits at her front window and sees in a 
slanting mirror everything that happens between her 
and the Avenue. 

We had not been told just where we were going (in 
that shut-in ditch one had no idea), and there in the 
mirror, beyond some straggling barbed wire and per- 
haps seventy-five yards of ordinary grass, was another 
clay bank — the trenches of the enemy ! Highlanders, 
Gurkhas, Heaven knows what — you could see nothing 
— but — over there was England ! 

So this was what these young soldiers had come to 
— here was the real thing. Drums beat, trumpets 
blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the regiment's head, 
and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or 
sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station 
— and you should see these German women marching 
out with their men! — you go marching out to war. 
You look out of the windows of various railway trains, 
then they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, 
and there, across a stretch of mud which might be 
your own back yard, is a clay bank, which is your 

137 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over 
your ditch and run forward until you are cut down. 
And when you have, so to speak, been thrown in the 
stream for the others to cross over, and the trench is 
taken, and you are put out of the way under a few 
inches of French earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as 
experience shows that it isn't worth while to try to 
keep a trench unless you have captured more than 
three hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and 
starts all over again. . . . 

We had walked on down the trenches, turned a 
bend where two trees had been blown up and flung 
across it, when there was a dull report near by, fol- 
lowed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out 
toward the enemy's trench. " U riser e Minen!" ("One 
of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier beside me, 
and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench. 
These bombs were cylinders, about the size of two 
baking-powder tins joined together, filled with dyna- 
mite and exploded by a fuse. They were thrown from 
a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just 
sufficient to toss them over into the opposite trench. 
The Germans knew what was coming, and they were 
laughing and watching in the direction of the English 
trenches. 

"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" 

There was a dull report and at the same moment 
something shot up from the English trenches and, very 
clear against the western sky, came flopping over and 
over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn. 

138 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

"Vorsicht! Vorsicht! 11 It sailed over our heads 
behind the trench, there was an instant's silence, and 
then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black smoke 
was flung in the air. Again there was a dull report, 
and we sent a second back — this time behind their 
trench — and again — "Vorsicht! Vorsicht! 11 — they sent 
an answer back. Four times this was repeated. 
A quainter way of making war it would be hard to 
imagine. They might have been boys playing "anty- 
over" over the old house at home. 

Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power. 
If thrown in the open they go off on the surface much 
like a gigantic firecracker. They are easy to dodge by 
daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown 
at night as part of a general bombardment, includ- 
ing shrapnel and heavy explosive shells, or exploding 
directly in the trench, they must be decidedly un- 
pleasant. 

The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and 
myself waiting on one side of the bend in the trench 
toward which the bombs were thrown, the others 
going ahead. It was several minutes before I rejoined 
them, and I did not learn until we were outside that 
they had been taken to another periscope through 
which they saw a space covered with English dead. 
There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying 
there, they said, some hanging across the barbed-wire 
entanglements at the very foot of the German trench, 
just as they had been thrown back in the attack which 
had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle. Several English- 

139 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

men had got clear into the German trench before the}' 
were killed. Here was another example of the curious 
localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could pass 
within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not 
know even that it was there. 

By another communication trench we returned to 
the little house. The sun was low by this time and 
the line of figures walking down the road toward the 
automobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of 
some British lookout picked us up— at any rate the 
whisper of bullets became uncomfortably frequent and 
near, and we had just got to the motors when — Tssee — 
ee — rr . . . Bong! a shell crashed into the church of 
La Bassee, only three hundred yards in front of us. 

Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower 
trajectory, it seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst 
beside the road so close to the first motor that it threw 
mud into it. Apparently we were both observed and 
sought after, and as the range of these main highways, 
up and down which troops and munitions pass, is 
perfectly known, there was a rather uncomfortable 
few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassee, 
with the women watching from their doors — no racing 
motors for them to run away in ! — and down the tree- 
arched road to ordinary life again. 

No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went 
back to a comfortable hotel, for the big city of Lille, 
which had shown trolley-cars and a certain amount of 
animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a 
city of the dead. The chambermaid shrugged her 

140 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

shoulders with something about a "punition" and, 
when asked why they were punished, said that some 
French prisoners had been brought through Lille a 
week or two before, and " naturally, the people shouted 
'Vive la France!"' 

So the military governor, as we observed next morn- 
ing in a proclamation posted on the blank wall across 
the street, informing the inhabitants that they " appar- 
ently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the 
situation," ordered the city to pay a 'fine of five hundred 
thousand francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go 
within doors at sundown and not stir abroad before 
seven next morning. Another poster warned people 
that two English aviators had been obliged to come 
down within the city, that they were still at large, 
and that any one who hid them or helped them escape 
would be punished with death, in addition to which 
the commune would be punished, too. 

It was through black and silent streets, therefore, 
that our troop was led from the hotel in which we 
were lodged to one in which we dined. Here every- 
thing was warm and light and cheerful enough. Boy- 
ish lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the Ger- 
man fashion, were telling each other their adventures, 
and here and there were older officers, who looked as 
if war had worn them a bit, and they had come here 
to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and 
the talk of some old friend. The bread was black and 
hard, but the other food as usual in France, with wine 
plenty and cheap, and even some of the round-shelled, 

141 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

coppery oysters — captured somehow, in spite of block- 
ades and bombardments — just up from Ostend. It 
was bedtime when we emerged into the black streets 
again, to discover, with something like surprise, a sky 
full of stars and a pale new moon. 

The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed 
— a sort of loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a 
pause for breath. You can imagine that cosmopoli- 
tan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone 
stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; 
at noon inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people com- 
ing home from church, the German guard changing, 
and the German band playing in the central square; 
at two o'clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer 
hotels, now full of German officers; at four pausing 
for a tantalizing moment in Middelkerk, while the 
German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge 
of the town were banging away at the British at Nieu- 
port down the beach. Next day Brussels — out to 
Waterloo, in a cloud of dust — the Congo Museum — the 
King's palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard 
like the tall King Leopold's leading these vandals 
through it, and looking unutterable things — a word 
with the civil governor, here — a charming lunch at a 
barracks, there — in short, a wild flight behind the man 
with the precious "Ausweis" 

We saw and sometimes met a good many German 
officers in a rather familiar way. Many of the younger 
men reminded one of our university men at home; 
several of the older men resembled their well-set-up 

142 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

English cousins. This seemed particularly true of the 
navy, which has acquired a type — lean, keen, firm- 
lipped young men, with a sense of humor — entirely 
different from the German often seen in caf£s, with no 
back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar. 
Particularly interesting were those who, called back 
into uniform from responsible positions in civil life, 
were attacking, as if building for all time, the appall- 
ingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a gov- 
ernment for a complex modern state, and winning 
the tolerance, if not the co-operation, of a conquered 
people confident that their subjection was but for 
the day. 

Our progress everywhere was down a continuous 
aisle of heel-clickings and salutes. Sometimes, when 
we had to pass through three rows of passport examiners 
between platform and gate, these formalities seemed 
rather excessive. In the grenadier barracks in Brus- 
sels we had been taken through sleeping-rooms, cool 
storerooms with their beer barrels and loops of sau- 
sages — "all made by the regiment" — and were just 
entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his 
superior officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it 
is every German subordinate's duty to do, bellowed 
out his "Meldung" — who and what the men in his 
room were, and that they were going to have meat and 
noodle soup for dinner. 

No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be 
taught, let alone achieve of his own free will, the utter 
self-forgetfulness with which this vast creature, every 

143 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or 
rather exploded: 

Herr Hauptmann! Mannschafts-Kuche-des- . . . ten-Land- 
wehr-Regiments ! Belegt-mit-einem- Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann ! 
Wir essen heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch! Zu Befehl! 

He had stepped down a century and a half from the 
grenadiers of the Great Frederic, and even our hosts 
may have smiled. It was different with the soldiers' 
salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we 
saw repeated scores of times a day. Whatever men 
might be doing, however awkward or inconvenient it 
might be, whether any one saw them or not, they 
stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue 
coats and stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, 
hands at their sides. If they were talking, they be- 
came silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed out, and 
into their eyes came an expression which, when you 
have seen it repeated hundreds of times, you will not 
forget. It is a look of seriousness, self-forgetfulness, 
of almost religious devotion, not to the individual, but 
to the idea for which he stands. I saw a soldier half- 
dressed, through a barracks window under which we 
passed, sending after his officer, who did not even 
see him, that same look, the look of a man who has 
just volunteered to charge the enemy's trench, or who 
sees nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God 
and nothing else in the world ! 

One seemed to see the soul of Germany, at least of 
this "great time," in these men's eyes. The Belgian 

144 



IN THE GERMAN TRENCHES 

soul we did not see much of, but there came glimpses 
of it now and then. 

In Antwerp we stopped in a little cafe for a cup of 
chocolate. It was a raw, cheerless morning, with oc- 
casional snowflakes whipping by on the damp north 
wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the room 
that used to be full of smoke and talk there were only 
empty tables, and you could see your breath. 

A man was scrubbing behind the bar, and a pale 
girl in black came out from behind the cashier's coun- 
ter to make our chocolate. It was good chocolate, as 
Antwerp chocolate is likely to be, and as we were get- 
ting ready to go out again I asked her how things were. 

She glanced around the room and answered that 
they used to have a good business here, but the good 
times were gone — "les beaux jours sont partis." Two 
others drifted over and asked questions about the 
bombardment. She answered politely enough, with 
the air of one to whom it was an old story now — she 
had left on the second day, when the building across 
the way was smashed, and walking, catching rides, 
stumbling along with the other thousands, had got 
into Holland. As to why the city fell so quickly — 
she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and mur- 
mured that there were things people did not know, 
if they did they did not talk about them. 

And the Germans — how were they? They had no 
complaints to make, the girl said; the Germans were 
well behaved — "tres correct." Possibly, then — it was 
our young Italian who put the question — the Belgians 

145 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

would just as soon ... I did not catch the whole 
sentence, but all at once something flashed behind that 
non-committal caf6 proprietress's mask. "Moi, je 
suis fibre d'etre Beige!" said the girl, and as she spoke 
you could see the color slowly burning through her 
pale face and neck — she was proud to be a Belgian — 
they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come 
a day, we could be sure of that — " un jour de revanche ! " 
But business is business, and people who run cafes 
must, as every one knows, not long indulge in the lux- 
ury of personal feelings. The officers turned up their 
fur collars, and we buttoned up our coats, and she was 
sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in 
black at the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain 
paused as we passed, gave a stiff little bow from the 
waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said: "Bon jour, 
mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as cafe 
proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the 
walls in the Antwerp streets: u Bon jour } monsieur!" 



146 



IX 

THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

Rumania and Bulgaria 

The express left Budapest in the evening, all night 
and all next day rolled eastward across the Hungarian 
plain, and toward dusk climbed up through the cool 
Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania. 

Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing 
there, Berlin and its iron exaltation, slow-rumbling 
London — all the West and the war as we had thought 
of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of 
the earth. We were on the edge of the East now, 
rolling down into the Balkans, into that tangle of 
races and revenges out of which the first spark of the 
war was flung. 

Since coffee that morning the lonely train had offered 
nothing more nourishing than the endless Hungarian 
wheat-fields, with their rows of peasants, men and 
women, working comfortably together, and rows of 
ploughs creeping with almost incredible leisure behind 
black water-buffalo cattle; but as we rolled down into 
Predeal through the rain, there, at last, in the dim 
station lamps, glittered the brass letters and brown 
paint of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons 
Lits — and something to eat. 

147 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The cars of this beneficent institution — survivors of 
a Europe that once seemed divided between tourists 
and hotel-keepers — outdash the most dashing war cor- 
respondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians 
are found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis 
with you as you do in a Pullman through our own 
alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his culture is in- 
tensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph- 
poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect 
between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought 
soup and a bottle of thin Hungarian claret, when the 
other three chairs at my table were taken by a Ru- 
manian family returning from a holiday in Budapest 
— an urbane gentleman of middle age, a shy little 
daughter, and a dark-eyed wife, glittering with dia- 
monds, who looked a little like Nazimova. 

"Monsieur is a stranger ?" said the Rumanian pres- 
ently, speaking in French as Rumanians are likely to 
do, and we began to talk war. I asked — a question 
the papers had been asking for weeks — if Rumania 
would be drawn into it. 

"Within ten days we shall be in," he said. 

"And on which side?" 

"Oh!" he smiled, "against Austria, of course!" 

That was in April. When I came through Rumania 
three months later soldiers were training everywhere 
in the hot fields; Bucarest was full of officers, the 
papers and cafes still buzzing with war talk. Rumania 
was still going in, but since the recapture of Lem- 
berg and the Russian retreat the time was not so sure 

148 




The entrance to the palace of King Ferdinand in Sofia. 




Bulgarian peasants in the market at Sofia and their water-buffalo cattle. These 
oxen do most of the heavy transport work in the Balkan highlands. 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

— not, it seemed, " until after the harvest" at any 
rate. 

I asked the Rumanian what he thought about Italy. 
"Italy began as a coquette. She will end" — he made 
the gesture of counting money into his hand — "she 
will end as a cocotte" He waved a forefinger in front 
of his face. 

"Elle n'est plus vierge!" he said. 

The wife demurred. Italy was poor and little, she 
must needs coquette. After all, ilfaut vivre — one must 
live. 

Something was said of America and the feeling 
there, and the wife announced that she would like of 
all things to see America, but — she did not wish to go 
there with her husband. I suggested that she come 
with me — an endeavor to rise to the Rumanian mood 
which was received with tolerant urbanity by her hus- 
band, and by the lady who looked like Nazimova with 
very cheering expressions of assent. 

"When you return from Constantinople/ ' she 
flashed back as they left the table, "don't forget!" 

These were the first Rumanians I had met. They 
were amiable, they spoke French — it almost seemed 
as if they had heard the tales that are usually told 
of their little capital, and were trying to play the 
appropriate introduction to Bucarest. 

Here it is, this little nation, only a trifle larger than 
the State of Pennsylvania, a half-Latin island in an 
ocean of Magyars and Slavs. On the north is Russia, 
on the south the grave and stubborn Bulgars (Slav at 

149 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

any rate in speech), on the west Hungary, and here, 
between the Carpathians and the Black Sea, this 
Frenchified remnant of the empire of ancient Rome. 
Their speech when it is not French is full of Latin 
echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is 
as fond of thinking himself a lineal and literal descen- 
dant of the Roman colonists as a New Englander is of 
ancestors in the Mayflower. At the Alhambra in 
Bucarest next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes 
had done their perfunctory turns and returned to their 
street clothes and the audience, to begin the more 
serious business of the evening, the movie man in the 
gallery threw on the screen — no, not some military 
hero nor the beautiful Queen whose photograph you 
will remember, but the head of the Roman Emperor 
Trajan ! And the listless crowd, drowsing cynically in 
its tobacco smoke, broke into obedient applause, just 
as they would at home at the sight of the flag or a 
picture of the President. 

Bucarest, like all the capitals of Spanish America, 
is another "little Paris," but the Rumanians, possibly 
because unhampered by sombre Spanish tradition or 
perhaps any traditions at all, succeed more completely 
in borrowing the vices and escaping the virtues of 
the great capital they are supposed to imitate. It 
would be more to the point to call Bucarest a little 
Buenos Aires. There is much the same showiness; a 
similar curious mixture of crudeness and luxury. But 
Buenos Aires is one of the world's great cities, and 
always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow 

150 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

feel the pampa and its endless cattle and wheat. The 
Rumanian capital is a town of some three hundred 
thousand people in a country you could lose in the 
Argentine, and there is nothing, comparatively speak- 
ing, to offset its light-mindedness, to suggest realities 
behind all this life of patisserie. 

You should see the Calea Vittorei on one of these 
warm summer evenings between five and eight. It is 
a narrow strip of asphalt winding through the centre 
of the town, with a tree-shaded drive at one end, and 
the hotels, sidewalk cafes, and fashionable shops at 
the other, and up and down this narrow street, in 
motors, in open victorias driven by Russian coachmen 
in dark-blue velvet gowns reaching to their heels, all 
Bucarest crowds to gossip, flirt, and see. 

Down the centre in the open carriages flows a stream 
of women — and many look like Nazimova — social dis- 
tinctions so ironed out with enamel, paint, and powder 
that almost all might be cafe chantant singers or dress- 
makers' marionettes. Some cities have eagles on their 
crests, and some volcanoes. If you were going to 
design a postage-stamp for Bucarest, it struck me 
that the natural thing would be a woman in the corner 
of an open victoria — after seeing scores of them all 
alike, you feel as though you could do it in a minute: 
one slashing line for the hat, two coal-black holes, and 
a dash of carmine in a patch of marble white, and a 
pair of silk-covered ankles crossed and pointed in a 
way that seems Parisian enough after one has become 
used to the curious boxes in which women enclose their 

151 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

feet in Berlin. Coming up from Bulgaria, which is 
not unlike coming from Idaho or Montana; or from 
Turkey, where women as something to be seen of men 
in public do not exist; or even across from the simple 
plains of Hungary, these enamelled orchids flowing 
forever down the asphalt seem at the moment to sum 
up the place — they are Bucarest. 

Officers in light blue, in mauve and maroon — minc- 
ing butterflies, who look as if an hour's march in the 
sun would send them to the hospital, ogle them from 
the sidewalk. Along with them are many young bloods 
out of uniform, barbered and powdered like chorus 
men made up for their work. You will see few young 
men in Europe with whom the notion of general con- 
scription and the horrors of war can be associated with 
less regret. 

Streams of more frugal nymphs, without victorias 
but with the same rakish air, push along with the side- 
walk crowd, hats pinned like a wafer over one ear, 
coiffures drawn trimly up from powdered necks. 
Waiters scurry about; the cafe tables, crowded in 
these days with politicians, amateur diplomats, spies, 
ammunition agents, Heaven knows what, push out on 
the sidewalk. The people on the sidewalk are crowded 
into the street, motors honk, hoofs clatter, the air is 
filled with automobile smoke, the smoke carries the 
smell of cigarettes and coffee and women's perfumes — 
it is "Bucarest joyeux!" 

Some French music-hall singer — when I came through 
it was Miss Nita-Jo — will tell you all about it at one 

152 




A corner of the Galea Vittorei, the main street of the Rumanian capital. 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

of the open-air theatres in the evening. All about the 
people you bump into in this sunset promenade — 

"Des gens d'la haute, des petits creves, 
Des snobs, des sportsmans, des coquets, 
Les noctambules, les vieux noceurs, 
Les grandes cocottes — oui ! tous en choeur . . ." 

— all about Capsa's, which, though but a little pastry 
shop and tea-room, is as seriously regarded in Buca- 
rest as Delmonico's or the Blackstone, which is, of 
course, with dreadful seriousness (to see one of the 
gilded youths of Bucarest enter Capsa's at five-thirty, 
solemnly devour a large chocolate eclair, and as sol- 
emnly stalk out again, is an experience itself), and all 
about the politicians and the men who are running 
things. Everything is in miniature, you see, in a 
little nation like this, which, although only as large 
as one of our smaller States, has a King and court, 
diplomats, and army, and foreign policy. All in the 
family, so to speak, and the chanteuse will sing amus- 
ing verses about the prime minister as if she really 
knew what he was going to do, and, curiously enough — 
for things are sometimes very much in the family, in- 
deed, in these little capitals — maybe she does know ! 

Of course the Calea Vittorei is not Rumania, though 
a good deal more so than Fifth Avenue is America; 
nor are the officers posing there those who would have 
much to do with directing the army if Rumania went 
to war. Ten minutes away from the city limits and 
you might be riding through the richest farming coun- 

153 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

try in Wisconsin or Illinois: hour after hour of corn 
and wheat, orchards, hops, and vineyards, cultivated 
by peasants who, though most of them have no land 
and little education, at least look care-free, and dress 
themselves in exceedingly pleasing homespun linen, 
hand-embroidered clothes. Then higher land, and hills 
as thick with the towers of oil-wells as western Pennsyl- 
vania, and, just before you cross into Hungary, the 
cool pines of the Carpathians and the villas of Sinaia, 
the summer home of the court, the diplomats, and the 
people one does not see very often, perhaps, in the 
afternoon parade. 

It is a pleasant and a rich little country. You can 
easily understand why its ruling class should love it, 
and, set apart from their Slav and Magyar neighbors 
by speech and temperament, want to gather all Ru- 
manians under one flag and push that, too, into its 
place in the sun. 

And this, of course, is Rumania's time — the time of 
all these little Balkan nations, which have been bullied 
and flattered in turn by the powers that need them 
now, and cut up and traded about like so much small 
change. 

Rumania wants the province of Bessarabia on her 
eastern border, a strip of which Russia once took away; 
she wants the Austrian province of Bukowina and the 
Hungarian banat of Temesvar on the west, but most 
of all the pine forests and the people of Transylvania, 
just over the divide — you cross it coming from Buda- 
pest — largely Rumanian in speech and sympathy, 

154 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

though a province of Hungary. As the Rumanians 
figure it out, they once stood astride the Carpathians 
— "a cheval" ("on horseback"); as they say — and so, 
they feel, they must and should stand now. 

We are a nation of fourteen million souls — six less than 
Hungary, but a homogeneous state, solidly based. Our soil 
gives us minerals and fuel and almost suffices for our needs. 
Our people are one of the most prolific in the world and cer- 
tainly not the least intelligent. We have behind us a conti- 
nuity of national existence lacking in other nations in this quar- 
ter of the globe. In our modern epoch we have assimilated 
French culture with indisputable success, and have given in 
every field proof of a great faculty of adaptability and progress. 
We can become the most important second-class power in 
Europe the day after the war stops; in fifty years, when our 
population will have passed twenty-five millions, a great power. 
We shall be a nation content with our lot, and for that reason 
a factor for peace. A greater Rumania responds not only to 
our ideas but to the interests of Europe. The Magyars have 
had every chance, and they have lost. It is now our turn. 

This is a characteristic editorial paragraph from La 
Roumanie, which is the voice of Mr. Take Ionesco, 
who, more than anybody else, is the voice of those 
who want war. Once in the government, but at the 
moment out of it, Mr. Ionesco keeps up a continuous 
bombardment of editorials and speeches, and with his 
vigor, verve, and facility reminds one a bit, though 
a younger man, of Clemenceau and his L'Homme 
Enchaine. 

Rich, well-informed, daring, and clever, with a 
really fascinating gift of expression, he will talk to 

155 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

you in French, English (his wife is English), Ruma- 
nian — I don't know how many other languages — ■ 
about anything you wish, always with the air of one 
who knows. We have no such adventurous states- 
men, or statesmen-adventurers, at home — men who 
have all the wires of European diplomacy at their 
finger ends; look at people, including their own, in 
the aggregate, without any worry over the "folks at 
home"; know what they want much better than they 
do, and to get it for them are quite ready to send a 
few hundred thousand to their death. 

Mr. Ionesco writes a long, double-leaded editorial 
every day, and very often he prints with it the speech, 
or speeches, he made the night before. In a time like 
this, he says, those of his way of thinking can't say too 
much; they must be "like the French Academicians, 
who never stop writing." Now and then, in the in- 
tervals of fanning the sparks of war, he takes his read- 
ers behind the scenes of European politics, of which 
he knows about as much, perhaps, as any one. 

I arrived in Paris the 31st of December, 1912, in the evening. 
M. Poincare received me the 1st of January, at half past eight 
o'clock in the morning — an absurd hour in Paris. But I had 
to go to London in the afternoon, and M. Poincare to the 
Elysee at ten o'clock for the felicitations of the New Year. I 
asked M. Poincare for the support of France in our difficulties 
with Bulgaria. M. Poincare said ... I said . . . and later 
events proved that I was right. 

He is always sure of himself, like this — no doubts, 
no half-truths, everything clear and irresistible. I 

156 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

went to see Mr. Ionesco one evening in Bucarest — a 
porte-cochere opening into a big stone city house, an 
anteroom with a political secretary and several lieu- 
tenants, and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, 
and Mr. Ionesco himself, a polished gentleman of con- 
tinental type, full of animation and sophisticated 
charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table. 

The room, the man, the facile, syllogistic sentences 
in which it was established that Austria-Hungary was 
already moribund, that Germany could never win, 
that Rumania must go in with the Entente — it was 
like the first scene from some play of European so- 
ciety and politics: one of those smooth, hard, swiftly 
moving things the Parisian Bernstein might have 
written. 

Across it I couldn't help seeing the Berlin I had just 
left, and people standing in line with their sandwiches 
at six o'clock to get into the opera or theatre — the 
live human beings behind that abstraction " Ger- 
many. " And I said that it seemed unfortunate that 
two peoples with so many apparent grounds of con- 
tact as the Germans and French must so misunder- 
stand each other. Their temperament and culture 
were different, to be sure, but they were both ideal- 
istic, sentimental people, to whom things of the mind 
and spirit were important. It seemed particularly 
unfortunate that everything should be done to force 
them apart instead of bringing them together. 

Mr. Ionesco listened with some impatience. Un- 
fortunate, no doubt, but what do you wish? War 

157 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

itself is unfortunate — we must take the world as it is. 
No, they were with France and down with the Ger- 
mans. France conquered meant the end of Rumania, 
subservience to Austria; France victorious, freedom, 
fresh air. 

He gave me a copy of a speech in which he gladly 
admitted that he was a "responsible factor." People 
talked of going slow and sparing blood. Well, they 
might get something by sitting still, even become a 
great country, but they could never become a great 
nation. It was not territory and population they 
wanted, but the sword of Rumania to join in remaking 
the map of Europe. When the delegates gathered 
around the green table, they did not want the one 
from Rumania, as he was at the Congress of Berlin, 
only able to make visits to chancelleries. He must go 
in the same door with them, and say : " In proportion 
to my population, I have shed as much blood as you." 

He had always regretted not having children, never 
so much as to-day; but if he had a dozen sons, and 
knew that all of them would fall in the war, he would 
not be cast down. Even if the territory they wished 
could be occupied by a simple act of gendarmerie, he 
would say no — they must enter Budapest itself (it is 
only twenty-four hours' railway journey from Buca- 
rest!) — not till then would Austria admit Rumania's 
superiority. People accused him of working for him- 
self. Who was Take Ionesco in comparison with the 
fate of a race? As for ambition, well, he had one, 
and only one — he wanted to see the Rumanian tri- 

158 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

color floating from Buda palace, and before he died 
to know the moment in which he could pass before 
his eyes the eighteen hundred years of Rumanian his- 
tory from the arrival of Trajan at Severin to the entry 
of Ferdinand at Budapest, and cry: "Now, Lord, 
let thy servant go in peace, for mine eyes have seen 
the saving of my race !" 

The Rumanian tricolor was no nearer Buda palace 
when I returned several months later, but Mr. Ionesco 
was no less hot for war. Even if Germany won, he 
said, they still should go in, because they would at 
least keep their own and Germany's respect. "Go to 
war?" — the phrase was inexact. "We have been at 
war for eleven months, only others are firing at us, 
but we are not firing at them. We are in a war that 
will decide our existence, but the soldiers dying to de- 
fend our rights, instead of being our soldiers, are soldiers 
of the Allies. The Allies will win, but if any one thinks 
that, having won without us, they will have won for 
us, he must be mad. Their victory without us may 
preserve our material life, but it will never save our 
moral life nor that of future generations." 

Mr. Ionesco and those who agree with him belong, 
it will be observed, with the romanticists — they are 
for the bright face of danger, great stakes, and, win or 
lose, putting all to the touch. Those who did nob 
agree with them were men without souls, hagglers and 
traders, as if a nation could figure out the number of 
cannon-shots and prisoners, and go where the going's 
good ! It made interesting reading as you sat at one 

159 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

of the cafe tables, with the crowd flowing by and the 
five-o'clock papers coming fresh from the press. The 
other side — and it included the King and most of the 
government, inasmuch as Rumania had not yet gone 
to war — had the more difficult task of making caution 
interesting. In their editorials and speeches Ionesco 
and his followers were jingoes trying to drive the na- 
tion to a Rumanian Sedan. 

"A people is great, not only for its numbers of sol- 
diers, but for its civilization, its artists, and intellectuals. 
A nation militarized is marked for eternal death, for a 
people lives by its thought and not by force." There 
was an amusing retort, the afternoon I returned to 
Bucarest, to one of the fire-eating retired generals, 
picturing the quaint old fellow as thinking that people 
were born only to die bravely, and knowing nothing of 
Rumania's role as the "defender of Latinism" in the 
Balkans, " tooting the funereal flute and showing us 
the mountains — there is to be your tomb !" 

There was a time, when the Russians were taking 
Przemysl, when Rumania's tide seemed to be at the 
flood— if ever it was going to be. That chance was 
lost, and Rumania found herself standing squarely in 
the track of the stream of ammunition which used to 
flow down from Dlisseldorf to the Turks — when I was 
at the front with the Turks, practically all the ammuni- 
tion boxes I saw, and there were hundreds of them, 
were marked "Gut uber Rumanien" — and, later, in 
Russia's path to Bulgaria and Servia. 

One of these days a hot thrill might run down the 

160 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

Calea Vittorei, and all at once Capsa's and the other 
little booths in this miniature Vanity Fair would seem 
strange and far away. But until that day one could 
fancy the romanticists and realists lambasting each 
other in the papers, the soldiers grinding away in their 
dusty camps, the pretty ladies rolling gayly down the 
sprinkled asphalt, and the chanteuse singing over the 
footlights: 

"Que pense V Premier Ministret 
On n'sait pas — " 
(" What thinks the Prime Minister? 
Nobody knows — ") 
"Is he for the Germans? 
Has he made a convention 
With perfidious Albion f 
Nobody knows. . . ." 

The Gate to Constantinople 

Only the Danube separates Rumania from Bulgaria, 
yet the people — of the two capitals, at least — are as 
different as the French and Scotch. The train leaves 
Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the 
river at Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the 
shoulders of long, rolling plateaus, are up in the moun- 
tains in Sofia that evening. The change is almost as 
sharp as that between Ostend and Folkestone. 

You leave French, or the half-Latin Rumanian lan- 
guage, for a Slavic speech, and the Cyrillic, or Russian, 
alphabet; names ending in "sco" or "ano" (Ionesco, 
Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in "off" (Rado- 

161 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

slavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), 
and all the show and vivacity, the cafes and cocottes 
of Bucarest, for a clean little mountain capital as 
determined and serious as some new town out West. 

It seemed, though of course such impressions are 
mostly chance, that the difference began at the border. 
In Rumania, at the Hungarian border, they took away 
my passport, which in times like these is like taking 
away one's clothes, and, though I assured the customs 
inspector that I was on my way to Constantinople, 
and in a hurry, it required four days' wait in Bucarest, 
and innumerable visits to the police before the paper 
was returned. Every one, apparently, on the train had 
the same experience — the Austrian drummers looked 
wise and muttered " baksheesh," and in Bucarest an 
evil-eyed hotel porter kept pulling me into corners, 
saying that this taking of passports was a regular " com- 
merce," and that for five francs he would have it back 
again. 

There is a popular legend that the clerks in Buca- 
rest hotels are supposed to offer incoming guests all 
the choices of a Mohammedan paradise, and the occa- 
sional misogynist, who prefers a room to himself, is re- 
ceived with sympathy, and the wish politely expressed 
that monsieur will soon be himself again. My own 
experience was less ornate, but prices were absurdly 
high, the waiter's check frequently needed revision, 
and one had a vague but more or less continual sense 
of swimming among sharks. 

These symptoms were absent in Bulgaria. The 

162 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

border officials seemed sensible men who would " listen 
to reason"; the porters, coachmen, waiters, and the 
like, crude rather than cleverly depraved, and the air 
of Sofia clear and clean, in more senses than one. 

Modern Bulgaria is only a couple of generations old, 
and though all this part of the world has been invaded 
and reinvaded and fought over since the beginning of 
things, the little kingdom (it seems more like a republic) 
has the air of a new country. 

The aristocracy had been wiped out before Bulgaria 
got her autonomy in 1878, and, unlike Rumania, where 
the greater portion of the land is in the hand of large 
proprietors, Bulgaria is a country of small farmers, 
of shepherds, peasants, each with his little piece of 
land. The men who now direct its fortunes are the 
sons and grandsons of very simple people. Possibly 
it is because we Americans are also a new people, with 
still some of the prejudices of pioneers, that we are 
likely to feel something in common with the people of 
this "peasant state." They seemed to me, at any 
rate, the most "American" of the Balkan peoples. 

There is, of course, one concrete reason for this: 
Robert College and the American School for Girls 
(Constantinople College) at Constantinople. It was 
men educated at Robert College who became the 
leaders of modern Bulgaria. The only Bulgarian I 
had known before — I met him on the steamer — had 
gone from a little village near Sofia to Harvard. His 
married sister had learned English at the American 
School for Girls; her husband, a Macedonian Bulgar, 

163 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

had worked his way through Yale. The amiable old 
general, who was always in the library at the Sofia 
Club at tea time, ready to tell how the Dardanelles 
and Constantinople could be taken, had learned Eng- 
lish at Robert College and had a son there; the pho- 
tographer who developed my films also had a son there 
— and so on. 

Snow-capped mountains rise just behind Sofia, and 
the brown hills thereabout, like the rolling plateaus 
along the shoulders of which the train crawls on the 
way down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep. 
Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd pa- 
tiently urging his little flock up a modern concrete 
sidewalk and stopping now and then for some passer-by 
to pick up a lamb, "heft" it, poke it, and feel its wool 
before deciding whether or not he should take it home 
for dinner. 

These shepherds wear roomy, short box-coats of 
sheepskin, with the leather outside and the wool 
turned in, like a motor-coat; homespun breeches em- 
broidered, very likely in blue, and laced from the knee 
down, and a sort of moccasin or laced soft shoe. They 
are as common in the streets of Sofia as are the over- 
barbered young snipes in the streets of Bucarest. On 
market days the main down-town street is filled with 
them — long-limbed, slow-moving old fellows, with 
eyes and foreheads wrinkled from years of squinting 
in the bright plateau sun, faces bronzed and weathered 
like an old farmhouse, shuffling down the pavement 
and into and out of shops with the slow, soft-footed 

164 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

gait of so many elk. And if you were designing a 
stamp for Bulgaria you might well put one of these 
hard-headed old countrymen on it, just as in the other 
capital you would put the girl in the victoria patter- 
ing down the asphalt. 

Two newspaper correspondents of the more or less 
continuous string that were filing from one Bulgarian 
leader to another to find out what Bulgaria was going 
to do, amiably permitted me to trail about with them, 
and thus to see and talk a little with some of those 
who are steering Bulgaria's exceedingly delicate course 
— men whose grandfathers very likely wore those 
sheepskin coats with the wool turned in. 

None had the peculiar verve and dash of Take 
Ionesco, but one or two were decidedly " smooth' ' in a 
grave, slightly heavy way, and all suggested stubborn- 
ness, intense patriotism, and a keen eye for the main 
chance. 

There is little "society" or formal entertaining in 
Sofia, little display and little, apparently, of that state 
of mind which, in Bucarest, is suggested by the 
handsome, two-horse public carriages at a time when 
there are not enough horses and carriages to go round. 
One-horse carriages are impracticable, because the 
Rumanian, or at least the Bucareno, thinks one horse 
beneath his dignity, while a trolley-car — although 
there are trolley-cars — is, of course, not to be thought of. 

People on the streets and in the parks were "nice-- 
looking rather than smart, and the young officers 
from the military school, who were everywhere, as 

165 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

fine and soldier-like young men as I had seen any- 
where in Europe. They and the common soldiers, 
with their fine shoulders and chests and wiry torsos, 
looked as though they were made for their work, and 
took to it like ducks to water. 

The palace is on the central square — an unpreten- 
tious building in the trees, with a driveway leading up 
from two gates, at which stand two motionless sen- 
tries, each with one stiff feather in his cap. It is such 
an entrance as you might expect to find at any com- 
fortable country place at home, and one day, when 
some student volunteers went by on a practise march, 
and cheered as they passed, I saw the King, with the 
Queen and one or two others, stroll down the drive 
and bow just as if he, too, were some comfortable coun- 
try gentleman. 

There is a music-hall in Sofia, but on the two nights 
I went to it there were scarce twenty in the audience. 
There are various beer gardens with music, and, of 
course, moving pictures, but it was interesting, in con- 
trast with Bucarest to find the crowd going to the 
National Theatre to see Tolstoi's " Living Corpse." 
The stock company, moderately subsidized by the gov- 
ernment, gives drama and opera on alternate nights. 
I barely got a seat for the Tolstoi play, and the door- 
keeper said that the house was always sold out. 

The Bulgarians, in short, are simple, and what the 
Rumanians would call "serieux" — you must abandon 
all notion of finding here anything like the little comic- 
opera kingdoms invented by some of our novelists. It 

166 




Bulgarian peasant children on the road to Samokov, near Sofia. 




Young Bulgarian officers — in summer uniform — in Sofia. 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

was in Bulgaria, as I recall it, that Mr. Shaw put " Arms 
and the Man/' and the fun lay, as you will remember, 
in the contrast between the outworn, feudal notions 
of the natives and the intense matter-of-factness of 
the modern Swiss professional soldier. 

You will recall the doubts of the heroine's male rela- 
tives as to whether Bluntschli was good enough for 
her, their ingenuous attempts to impress him, by de- 
scribing the style in which she was accustomed to live, 
and his unimpressed response that his father had so 
and so many table-cloths, so many horses, so many 
hundreds of plates, etc. Who was he, then — king of 
his country? Oh, no, indeed — he ran a hotel. Mr. 
Shaw's fun is all right of itself, but has about as much 
application to Bulgaria or Sofia as to Wyoming^ or 
Denver. 

By one of those frequently fascinating chances of 
geography, this little nation, which has a territory 
about as big as Ohio, is set squarely in front of the 
main gate to Constantinople, and saw, in consequence, 
the powers which ruthlessly bullied it yesterday now 
almost at its feet. 

Rumania stands in Russia's path, on the one hand, 
and, with its railway, in Germany's on the other; but 
Bulgaria does both, and, in addition, blocks the whole 
western frontier of Turkey and the only feasible 
chance to land an army from the iEgean. 

After their disastrous attempt to run the Dardanelles 
in March, the English and French had been somewhat 
in the position of an army trying to capture Jackson- 

167 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

ville ; Florida, for instance, and instead of marching 
over from Georgia, compelled to go away down to Key 
West, and fight their way up through the Everglades. 
They had in front of them hills behind hills and an 
intrenched enemy whom they could not see generally 
and who could always see them. Behind them was 
only a strip of beach, the sea, and the more or less un- 
certain support of their ships. So narrow was their 
foothold that even if they had had more men, they 
could scarce find place to use them. 

Could they but land in Bulgaria, they might cut off 
the Turks from Europe at once, accumulate at their 
leisure a sufficient force, and push down methodically 
from a proper base to the Chatalja line, fighting like 
men instead of amphibious ducks. The thing looks 
easy, and the twisted hills and hidden batteries of Gal- 
lipoli Peninsula were so heart-breaking a maze to fling 
good men into that you can well imagine the Allies 
used what pressure they could. But if it was impor- 
tant to them that the gate be opened — let alone that 
Bulgaria come in herself — it was just as important to 
the Germans and Austrians that it be closed. And 
who was to say that if Bulgaria threw in her lot with 
the Allies and attacked the Turks the Central Powers 
might not even start a grand offensive down through 
Serbia — and people talked of this in Sofia months be- 
fore it actually began — connect up their lines all the 
way to Constantinople — and good-by to their little 
peasant state and her hard-won independence ! 

A little state must think of these things. She hasn't 

168 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

the men nor the staggering supply of ammunition 
lightly to go into a world war like this. And then the 
Bulgarians had had their fingers burned once — they 
were not looking for adventures. 

You will remember the Balkan War of 1912-3, and 
how the Bulgars fought their way down almost to Con- 
stantinople and were everybody's heroes for a time. 
Then came the quarrel between the Balkan allies, and 
presently Bulgaria was fighting for her life — Serbia on 
the west, Greece on the south, Turkey on the east — 
and then, when she was quite helpless, the Rumanians 
coming down from the north to perform the coup de 
grace. 

It was not a particularly sporting performance on 
the part of the Rumanians, nor could the turning over 
to them of the Bulgarian part of the province of Do- 
brudja greatly increase Bulgaria's trust in the powers 
which permitted it in the treaty of Bucarest. 

"It's our own fault," an Englishman said to me, 
speaking somewhat sardonically of the failure of the 
Rumanians to go in with Italy in spite of having ac- 
cepted a timely loan from England. "We put our 
money on the wrong horse ! No, they'll keep on talk- 
ing — they're the chaps who want to get something for 
nothing. Think of the treaty of Bucarest and the 
way we patted Rumania on the back — she was the 
gendarme of Europe then. ' Gendarme of Europe ! ' 
... I tell you that any army that would do what 
the Rumanians did to Bulgaria has something wrong 
with its guts!" 

169 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

An army goes where it is ordered, of course, but it 
is true, nevertheless, that the Bulgarians are likely to 
think of their neighbors on the north as people who want 
to get something for nothing, and that they who had 
borne the brunt of the war with Turkey lost every- 
thing they had gained. The Turks, " driven from 
Europe," calmly moved back to Adrianople; Rumania 
took the whole of Dobrudja; Bulgarian Macedonia 
went to Serbia and Greece. However much Bulgaria 
may have been to blame for the break-up of the Bal- 
kan League — and she was stubborn and headstrong to 
say the least — there is no denying that the treaty of 
Bucarest did not give her a square deal. It was one 
of those treaties of peace (and you might think that 
the men who sit around the green table and make such 
treaties would learn it after a time) that are really 
treaties of war. 

No, Bulgaria was not looking for adventures, nor 
accepting promises unless she had securities that they 
would be carried out. You could not talk to any in- 
telligent Bulgarian five minutes without feeling the 
bitterness left by the treaty of Bucarest and the 
fixed idea that Bulgarian Macedonia must come under 
the flag again. But though this was true, and the 
army mobilized, and on a fine day every other man on 
the streets of Sofia an officer, the stubborn Bulgars 
were still sitting tight. If they got what they wanted 
without fighting for it, they were not anxious to throw 
away another generation of young men as they had 
thrown them away for nothing in the Balkan War. 

170 



THE ROAD TO CONSTANTINOPLE 

By this negative policy — the pressure, that is to 
say, of not going to war — Bulgaria had induced Tur- 
key, by the time I came through Sofia again three 
months later, to turn over enough territory on the 
east so that the Bulgars could own the railroad down 
to Dedeagatch and reach the iEgean without being 
obliged to go into Turkey and out again. It even 
seemed that Bulgaria might be able to keep her neu- 
trality to the end. Her compromise with Turkey was 
not so odd as it seemed to many at first. She had 
fought the Turks, to be sure, but now got what she 
wanted, and when you come to think of it, it might 
well be more comfortable from the Bulgars' point of 
view to have the invalid Ottomans in Constantinople 
than the healthy and hungry Russians. 

Both these small states, in their present hopes, 
fears, and, dangers, are an instructive spectacle to 
those who fancy that in the crowded arena of Europe 
a little nation can always do as it wants to, or that 
its neutrality is always the simple open-and-shut mat- 
ter it looked to be, for instance, in the first weeks of 
August, 1914. We are likely, at home, to look on 
all this cold-blooded weighing of the chances of war 
with little patience, to think of all these " aspirations" 
as merely somebody else's land. Fear or envy of 
our neighbors, international hatred, is almost unknown 
with us. All that was left behind, three thousand miles 
away, and the green water in between permits us to 
indulge in the rare luxury of altruism. 

Yet these hatreds, these fears, and ambitions, in- 

171 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

herited and carefully nourished; are just as real — par- 
ticularly in little states like these — as the fact, odd and 
apparently unreasonable as it may be, that in a bit of 
country, which might be included in one of our larger 
States, one lot of people should speak French and think 
like Latins, and another speak Slavic and think another 
way, and that neither wants to be absorbed by the 
other any more than we want to be compelled to speak 
Spanish or be absorbed by the Mexicans. 

The " aspirations" of both these little countries have 
realities behind them. It is a fact that one gets a 
whiff of French clarity and verve in Rumania, though 
it comes from a small minority educated in France, and 
the Rumanian people may be no more " Latin" than 
we are. And it is an interesting notion — though per- 
haps only a notion — that Rumania should be the out- 
post or rear-guard of Latinism in this part of the 
world; a bit of the restless West on the edge of the 
Orient. 

For virility and earnestness like that of the Bulgars 
there is a place, not only in the Balkans, but every- 
where. The qualities they have shown in their short 
life as an independent nation are those which deserve 
to be encouraged and preserved. And if it were true 
that this war were being fought to establish the right 
of little nations to live, one of the tasks it ought to 
accomplish, it seemed then, was to give the Bulgars 
back at least part of what was taken from them. 



172 



X 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out 
across it to the green hills of Asia, just where the blue 
Marmora narrows into the Dardanelles. It is one of 
those crowded little Turkish towns set on a blazing 
hillside — tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weather- 
warped frame houses, with overhanging latticed win- 
dows and roofs of red tiles; little walled-in gardens 
with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses; 
fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets 
fork and women come to fill their water-jars — a dreamy, 
smelly, sun-drenched little town, drowsing on as it has 
drowsed for hundreds of years. 

Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli — I speak as if the 
war hadn't happened ! The graceful Greek sloops, with 
their bellying sails and turned-up stems and sterns, 
come sailing in much as they must have come when 
the Persians, instead of the English and the French, 
were battering away at the Hellespont. The grave, 
long-nosed old Turks pull at their bubble pipes and 
sip their little cups of sweet, black coffee; the camel 
trains, dusty and tinkling, come winding down the nar- 
row streets from the Thracian wheat country and go 
back with oversea merchandise done up in faded car- 

173 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

pets and boxes of Standard Oil. The wind blows from 
the north, and it is cold, and the Marmora gray; it 
blows from the south, and all at once the world is warm 
and sea and sky are blue — so soft, so blue, so alive with 
lifting radiance that one does not wonder the Turk is 
content with a cup of coffee and a view. 

Nothing ever happens in Gallipoli — then the war 
came, and everything happened at once. It was a 
still May morning, a Sunday morning, when the Eng- 
lish and French sent some of their ships up into the 
Gulf of Saros, on the ^Egean side of the peninsula, over 
behind Gallipoli. Eight or ten miles of rolling coun- 
try shut away the iEgean, and made people feel safe 
enough. They might have been in the other wars 
which have touched Gallipoli, but a few miles of coun- 
try were nothing at all to the guns of a modern battle- 
ship. 

An observation-balloon looked up over the western 
horizon, there was a sudden thunder, and all at once 
the sky above Gallipoli rained screaming shells and 
death. You can imagine — at any rate remembering 
Antwerp, I could very well imagine — how that hurri- 
cane of fire, sweeping in without warning, from people 
knew not where, must have seemed like the end of the 
world. You can imagine the people — old men with 
turbans undone, veiled women, crying babies — tum- 
bling out of the little bird-cage houses and down the 
narrow streets. Off went the minaret, as you would 
knock off an icicle, from the mosque on the hill. The 
mosque by the water-front went down in a cloud of 

174 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

dust, and up from the dust, from a petrol shell, shot 
a geyser of fire. Stones came rumbling down from the 
old square tower, which had stood since the days of 
Bayazid; the faded gray houses squashed like eggs. 
It was all over in an hour — some say even twenty 
minutes — but that was long enough to empty Gallipoli, 
to kill some sixty or seventy people, and drive the 
rest into the caves under the cliffs by the water, or 
across the Marmora to Lapsaki. 

Now, while the bombardment of Gallipoli may not 
appear, from a merely human point of view, a particu- 
larly sporting performance, yet, as most of those killed 
were soldiers, as Gallipoli had been a staff head- 
quarters not long before, and always has been a natural 
base for the defense of the Dardanelles, the attack was 
doubtless justified by the rules of war. It happens, 
however, that people who five in defenseless, bom- 
barded towns are never interested in the rules of war. 
So a new and particularly disturbing rumor went flying 
through the crowded streets of Constantinople. 

It is a city of rumors, this beautiful, bewildering 
Bagdad of the West, where all the races of the world 
jostle each other in the narrow streets, and you never 
know how the man who brushes past you lives — let 
alone feels and thinks. The Constantinople trolley- 
cars are divided by a curtain, on one side of which sit 
the men, on the other the veiled women. When there 
are several women the conductor slides the curtain 
along, so that half the car is a harem; when there are 
none he slides it back, and there is no harem at all. 

175 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

And life is like that. You are at once in a modern 
commercial city and an ancient Mohammedan capital, 
and never know when the one will fade out like a pic- 
ture on a screen and leave you in the Orient, facing 
its mystery, its fatalism, its vengeance that comes in a 
night. 

You can imagine what it must become, walled in 
with war and censorship, with the English and French 
banging away at the Dardanelles gate to the south, 
the Russian bear growling at the door of the Bosporus, 
so close that you can every now and then hear the 
rumble of cannon above the din of Constantinople — 
just as you might hear them in Madison Square if 
an enemy were bombarding the forts at Sandy Hook. 

You wake up one morning to hear that all the influ- 
ential Armenians have been gathered up and shipped 
to the interior; you go down to the ordinary-looking 
hotel breakfast-room, and the three Germans taking 
coffee in the corner stop talking at once; at lunch 
some one stoops to whisper to the man across the table, 
there is a moment's silence until the waiter has gone, 
and the man across the table mutters: "The G. V. 
says not to worry" — "G. V." meaning Grand Vizier. 
To-morrow the Goeben is to be blown up, or there will 
be a revolution, or a massacre — heaven knows what ! 

Into an atmosphere like this, with wounded pour- 
ing back in thousands from the Dardanelles, there came 
the news of the bombardment of Gallipoli. And with 
it went the rumor of reprisal — all the English and 
French left behind in Constantinople, and there were 

176 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

a good many who had been permitted to go about 
their business more or less as usual, were to be col- 
lected, men, women, and children, taken down to the 
peninsula and distributed in the "unfortified" towns. 
The American ambassador would notify England and 
France through Washington, and if then the Allies 
chose to bombard, theirs was the risk. 

The American ambassador, Mr. Morgenthau, set 
about to see what could be done. Presently the word 
went round that the women might stay behind, but 
the men, high and low, must go. They came flocking 
to the embassy, already besought for weeks by French 
Sisters of Mercy and Armenians in distress, some beg- 
ging for a chance to escape, some ready to go anywhere 
as their share of the war. The Turks were finally in- 
duced to include only those between twenty and forty, 
and at the last moment this was cut to an even fifty — 
twenty-five British subjects, twenty-five French. 

The plan eliminated, naturally, the better-known 
remnants of the French and English colonies, and dis- 
appointed the chief of police, who had not unreason- 
ably hoped, as he wistfully put it, "to have some 
notables." Of the fifty probably not more than a 
dozen had been born in England or France, the others 
being natives of Malta, Greece — the usual Levantines. 
Yet if these young bank clerks and tradesmen were 
not "important," according to newspaper standards, 
they were, presumably, important to themselves. 
They were very important, indeed, to the wives and 
mothers and sisters who fought up to the Galata sea 

177 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

wall that Thursday morning, weeping and wailing, and 
waving their wet handkerchiefs through the iron fence. 

The hostages, one or two of whom had been called 
to their doors during the night and marched away 
without time to take anything with them, had been 
put aboard a police boat, about the size of a New York 
revenue cutter, and herded below in two little cabins, 
with ten fierce-looking Constantinople policemen, in 
gray astrakhan caps, to guard them. It was from the 
water-line port-holes of these cabins that they waved 
their farewells. 

With them was a sturdy, bearded man in black 
knickerbockers and clerical hat, the rector of the 
Crimean Chapel in Constantinople — a Cambridge and 
Church of England man, and a one-time dweller in the 
wilds of Kurdistan, who, though not called, had volun- 
teered to go. The first secretary of the American 
embassy, Mr. Hoffman Philip, an adventurous humani- 
tarian, whose experience includes an English univer- 
sity, the Rough Riders, and service as American min- 
ister to Abyssinia, also volunteered, not, of course, as 
hostage, but as friendly assistant both to the Turkish 
authorities and to their prisoners. 

To him was given the little deck-cabin, large enough 
for a man to stretch out on the seat which ran round 
it; here, also, the clergyman volunteer was presently 
permitted, and here, too, thanks to passports vouch- 
safed by the chief of police, the chroniclers of the 
expedition, Mr. Suydam, of the Brooklyn Eagle, and 
myself. 

178 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

The passports, mysterious scratches in Turkish, did 
not arrive until the last minute, and with them came 
the chief, the great Bedri Bey himself — a strong man 
and a mysterious one, pale, inscrutable, with dark, 
brooding eyes and velvety manners, calculated to en- 
velop even a cup of coffee and a couple of boiled eggs 
in an air of sinister romance. 

The chief regretted that the craft was not " a serious 
passenger boat," for we should probably have to spend 
the night aboard. Arrangements for the hostages 
and ourselves would be made at Gallipoli, though just 
what they would be it was difficult to say, as there 
were, he said, no hotels in the place and the houses 
were all destroyed. 

With this cheerful prospect he bade us farewell, 
and, all being ready, we waited two hours, and finally, 
just before noon, with deck-hands hanging life belts 
along the rail to be ready for possible English sub- 
marines, churned through the crowded shipping of 
the Golden Horn, round Stamboul, and out into the 
blue Marmora. 

The difficulties of the next few days — for which 
most of the hostages, city-bred and used to the bake- 
shop round the corner, were unprepared — promptly 
presented themselves. Lunch-time came, but there 
was no lunch. There was not even bread. Philip 
and Suydam had tinned things, and the former some 
cake, which by tea-time that afternoon — so appallingly 
soon does the spoiled child of town get down to funda- 
mentals — seemed an almost immoral luxury. But the 

179 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

luckless fifty, already unstrung by the worry of the 
last forty-eight hours, fed on salt sea air, and it was not 
until sundown that one of the British came to ask what 
should be done. Philip dug into his corned beef and 
what was left of the bread, and so we curled up for the 
night, the hostages and policemen below, the rest of 
us in the deck-house, rolled up in all the blankets we 
had, for one of the Black Sea winds was blowing down 
the Marmora and it was as cold as November. 

The launch came up to Gallipoli wharf in the night, 
and not long after daylight we were shaken out of our 
blankets to receive the call of the mutessarif, or local 
governor, a big, slow, saturnine man in semi-riding- 
clothes, with the red fez and a riding-whip in his hand, 
who spoke only Turkish and limited himself to few 
words of that. He was accompanied by a sort of secre- 
tary or political director — a plump little man, with 
glasses and a vague, slightly smiling, preoccupied 
manner, who acted as interpreter. 

The governor and Philip were addressed as "Excel- 
lence," the secretary as "Monsieur le Directeur" and, 
considering that all concerned were only half awake, 
and we only half dressed, the interview, which included 
the exchange of cigarettes and many salutes, was ex- 
tremely polite. We joined the mutessarif and his 
secretary in a stroll about the town. 

It was deserted — closed shutters, empty houses and 
shops, not so much as the chance to buy a round, flat 
loaf of black bread — a shell of a town, with a few 
ravenous cats prowling about and forgotten chickens 

180 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

pecking the bare cobblestones. We saw the shell hole 
in the little Mohammedan cemetery, where four peo- 
ple, " come to visit the tombs of their fathers/' had been 
killed, the smashed mosques, yawning house-fronts, 
and dangling rafters, and there came over one an in- 
describable irony as one listened, in this Eastern world 
of blazing sun, blue sky, and blue water, to the same 
grievances and indignations one had read in London 
editorials and heard in the beet-fields of Flanders 
months ago. 

The mutessarif took us to a little white villa on the 
cliff by the sea, with a walled garden, flat black cedar, 
and a view of the Marmora, and we breakfasted on 
tea, bread and butter, and eggs. Meanwhile the hos- 
tages had been marched to an empty frame house on 
the beach, from the upper windows of which, while 
gendarmes guarded the street-door, they were gloomily 
peering when we returned to the launch. Philip, un- 
easy at the emptiness of the town and leisurely fashion 
in which things were likely to move, started for Lap- 
saki, across the Marmora, for food and blankets, and 
Suydam and I strolled about the town. We had gone 
but a few steps when we observed an aimless-looking 
individual in fez and civilian clothes following us. 
We tramped up-hill, twisted through several of the hot 
little alley-like streets — he followed like our shadow. 
We led him all over town, he toiling devotedly behind, 
and when we returned to the beach, he sat himself 
down on a wood-pile behind us, as might some dismal 
buzzard awaiting our demise. 

181 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

He, or some of his fellow sleuths, stuck to us all that 
day. Once, for exercise, I walked briskly out to the 
edge of the town and back again. The shadow tod- 
dled after. I went up to the basin beside the ruined 
mosque, a sort of sea-water plaza for the town, and, 
taking a stool outside a little cafe, which had awakened 
since morning, took coffee. The shadow blandly took 
coffee also, which he consumed silently, as we had no 
common tongue, rose as I rose, and followed me back 
to the beach. 

Out in the Marmora, which is but little wider here 
than the Hudson at Tappan Zee, transports crammed 
with soldiers went steaming slowly southward, a black 
destroyer on the lookout for submarines hugging 
their flanks and breaking trail ahead of them. Over 
the hills to the south, toward Maidos and the Dar- 
danelles, rolled the distant thunder — the cannon the 
hapless fifty, looking out of their house on the beach, 
had been sent down to stop — and all about us, in the 
dazzling Turkish sunshine, were soldiers and supply- 
trains, landing, disembarking, pushing toward the 
front. Fine-looking men they were, too, these infantry- 
men, bronzed, well-built fellows, with heavy, high 
cheek-bones, longish noses, black mustaches, and dark 
eyes, who, whatever their qualities of initiative might 
be, looked to have no end of endurance and ability to 
stay put. Bullock-carts dragged by big, black buffalo 
cattle, carrying their heads far back, as if their big 
horns were too heavy for them, crowded the street 
leading to the quay, and camels, strung in groups of 

182 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

five, came swinging in, or kneeling in the dust, waved 
their long, bird-like necks, and lifted up a mournful 
bellow, as if protesting in a bored, Oriental way, at a 
fate which compelled them to bear burdens for the 
nagging race of men. 

It was to an accompaniment of these howls that a 
young Turkish officer came over to find out who these 
strangers might be. We spoke of the hostages, and 
he at once said that it was an excellent idea. The 
English and French were very cruel — if now they chose 
to bombard. ... "If a man throws a penny into the 
sea," he said, "he loses the penny. It isn't the pocket- 
book that's hurt." I did not quite grasp this proverb, 
but remarked that after all they were civilians and 
had done nothing. "That is true," he said, "but the 
English and French have been very unjust to our 
civilians. They force us to another injustice — c'est 
la guerre." 

Toward the end of the afternoon the hostages, 
closely guarded, were marched up into the town and 
lodged in two empty houses — literally empty, for there 
was neither bed nor blanket, chair nor table — nothing 
but the four walls. A few had brought mattresses and 
blankets, but the greater number, city-bred young 
fellows, unused to looking after themselves out of 
doors, had only the clothes they stood in. The north 
wind held; directly the sun went down it was cold 
again, and, only half fed with the provisions Philip 
brought over from Lapsaki, they spent a dismal night, 
huddled on the bare floor, under their suitcases or 

183 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

whatever they could get to cover them, and expecting 
another bombardment at dawn. 

We, on the contrary — that is to say, Philip and his 
two guests — were taken to a furnished house over- 
looking the Marmora — the house, as it presently ap- 
peared, from the pictures of Waterloo on the walls 
and the English novels in a bookcase up-stairs, lately 
occupied by the British consular agent. To his excel- 
lency a room to himself up-stairs, with a real bed, was 
given; the historians were made perhaps even more 
comfortable on mattresses on the dining-room floor. 

We were all sleepy enough to drop on them at once, 
but another diplomatic dinner had been planned, it 
appeared, and Turkish politeness can no more be hur- 
ried nor overcome than can that curious impassive 
resistance which a Turk can maintain against some- 
thing he does not wish done. It was nine o'clock be- 
fore we sat down with the mutessarif, his secretary, 
and the voluble journalist to a whole roast kid, a rather 
terrifying but exceedingly palatable dish, stuffed with 
nuts, rice, and currants, and accompanied by some of 
the wine of Lapsaki, rice pudding, and a huge bowl of 
raw eggs, which were eaten by cracking the shell, ele- 
vating one's head, and tossing them down like oysters. 

The dinner was served by one Dimitri, a brawny, 
slow-moving Greek. Dimitri was dressed in a home- 
spun braided jacket and homespun Turkish trousers, 
shaped like baggy riding-breeches, and his complete 
impenetrability to new ideas was only equalled by the 
solemnity and touching willingness with which he re- 

184 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

ceived them. It was after he had served us in the 
ignoble capacity of dish-washer and burden-carrier for 
several days that we were informed one evening by 
the governor's secretary, in his vague way, that Di- 
mitri was an "architect." 

"Architecte naturel," suggested the urbane Philip, 
and the governor's secretary assented. Slow Dimitri 
might be, but once he grasped an idea, no power could 
drag it from him. When one asked him where he 
learned to build houses of a certain style, he always 
replied that so they were built by Pappadopoulos — ■ 
Pappadopoulos being dead these twenty or thirty 
years. Dimitri, the secretary ventured, had been archi- 
tect of the mosque on the water-front, and when he 
found that we were pleased with this idea, everything 
else in Gallipoli became Dimitri's. The lighthouse, 
the hospital, the three white houses by the quay — • 
we had but to mention a building and he would 
promptly murmur, in his dreamy, half-quizzical way: 
"Oui-i-i . . . c'est Dimitri!" 

Early next morning, just after we had discovered 
that under the cliff was water like liquid lapis lazuli 
and flat-topped rocks rising just above it on which you 
would not have been in the least surprised to find 
mermaids combing their hair, or sirens sitting, and that 
it was a simple matter to climb down and be mermen, 
'the clergyman- volunteer arrived with reports of the 
first night. It had been dismal, there were one or 
two intransigent kickers, and the aesthetic young 
Frenchman who spent his idle time drawing pictures 

185 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

of fashion-plate young ladies, had become so unstrung 
that he had regularly "thrown a fit" and been uncon- 
scious for half an hour until they could massage him 
back to life again. Humor was quite gone out of them, 
and when the clergyman suggested that it was a com- 
pliment to be sent out to be shot at — flattering, at 
any rate, to the prowess of the Allies — a Frenchman 
emphatically denied it. "Pas du tout!" he exploded. 

While we talked there was a knock at the front door, 
and through the grating we saw the red fez and vaguely 
smiling visage of the mutessarif s secretary. It was 
the first of a series of visits, which, before we left Gal- 
lipoli, were renewed almost every hour, of dialogues 
deserving a better immortalization than can be given 
here. 

You must imagine, on one side of the dining-room 
table, the plump little bey, with his fez and glasses, 
quick little salutes each time he took a match or 
cigarette; facing him the tall, urbane Philip, in ineffa- 
ble flannels or riding-clothes — for the embassy secre- 
tary is one of those who believe that clothes should 
express rather than blot out the inner man. Cigarettes 
— coffee — assurances to his excellency that the house 
is his, to Monsieur le Directeur of our pleasure and pro- 
found consideration. Minutes pass, an hour — the bey 
knows no such thing as time, the other is as unhurried 
as he. The talk, in somewhat halting French, is of 
war, weather, French culture, marriage, those dread- 
ful Russians, punctuated by delicate but persistently 
recurring references, on one side, to mattresses and 

186 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

food for the hostages, by the little bey's deep sighs 
and his " Mais . . . que f aire?" 

That "But what can be done?" like the Mexican's 
"Who knows?" fell like a curtain on every pause, it 
was the bey's answer to all life's riddles — the plight 
of the hostages, the horrors of war, his own dream of 
being governor of a province close to Constantinople. 
One can hear him now through that cloud of cigarette 
smoke, "Mais — " with a pause and scarcely percep- 
tible lifting of the shoulders — "que f aire? ..." 

We went across to Lapsaki again that day to get 
blankets and buy or order mattresses, and found it 
much what Gallipoli must have been a few days be- 
fore — sunshine and soldiers, camels loaded with stretch- 
ers and Red Cross supplies, the hot little twisting 
streets, noisy with traders and refugees. 

You can imagine the excitement over this mysterious 
stranger with an unlimited supply of gold lire and big 
silver medjidies, asking not what kind of blankets, but 
how many did they have, how long would it take them 
to make not one, but fifty mattresses ! Greek traders, 
Jews from the Dardanelles, one or two hybrid youths 
in fez and American clothes, with recommendations 
from American Y. M. C. A's — it was a great afternoon 
for Lapsaki ! 

A round-faced, jolly German nurse, dropped all 
alone in the little town by the chance of war, met us 
in the street, and later we went to her hospital. It 
had been started only a fortnight before, there were no 
beds, and the wounded lay on narrow mattresses on 

187 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

the floor. One man, whose face was a mere eyes and 
nose poking through patches of plaster, had been burned 
at Gallipoli. Another, up from the Dardanelles, had 
a hideous wound in his cheek, discharging constantly 
into his mouth. In spite of it he took Philip's cigarette 
and smoked it. He was dead when we came back 
three days later. On another mattress was a poor 
little brown bundle, a boy of twelve or thirteen, hit in 
the spine and paralyzed by a fragment of shell at Gal- 
lipoli and now delirious. Philip later took him back 
to Constantinople, to the X-ray and care that might 
save his life. 

It was sundown when we got back to the hostages 
with our spoils. The thing had begun to get on their 
nerves. The English said little, determined evidently 
to remain Britons to the last, but some of the Levan- 
tines let themselves go completely. A pale gentleman 
with a poetic beard, a barber by profession, was among 
the most eloquent. It was not a jail, it was a mad- 
house, he cried. Another declared that without bed- 
ding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end 
of the war, probably, they must at least have food — 
that was a need "primordial!" 

Another stood apart, whacking his chest and ad- 
dressing the empty air, "C'est moi, c'est moi, qui n'a 
pas a 1 ' argent!" — it was he who had no money and 
nothing to cover him, and what did they want him 
to do ? If he had come down to be shot at, well and 
good, but if he was to be frozen and starved by 
inches . . . 

188 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

Philip smoothed them down as best he could and 
returned to invite the governor's secretary to stay for 
dinner, a repast for which Hassan, the embassy khavass 
who accompanied the expedition, had procured, as he 
put it, "some fresh eggies from a nice little man." 
The bey, who, that morning, had leaned toward the 
French, now warmed to America. The French were 
enlightened, he said, but without morals, the English 
civilized but jealous; if he had any sons he would send 
them to America, the only place where young men 
were both civilized and properly "serieux" In the 
midst of these amiable speculations it was suggested 
that, in view of the difficulty of getting mattresses, 
the government might even requisition them. The 
suggestion drew a regretful sigh from the bey, for 
Turkey was a constitutional country, he said, the shops 
and houses were closed and their owners gone, and there 
was no way in which such a thing could be done. 

In addition to Hassan's eggies, Philip's Man Friday, 
the incomparable Levy, had constructed some rice 
puddings, and it was in despair that he announced, 
just before they were to be served, that two had "gone 
by the cats" ! We had, indeed, by this time attracted 
most of the cats in Gallipoli. They streaked through 
the rooms like chain lightning, and in the dead of night 
went galloping over the piano keyboard with sounds 
so blood-curdling that Suydam put his mattress on the 
sofa and his sleeping-bag on top of that, and, shutting 
himself in, defied them. 

The incomparable Levy was Italian by his birth and 

189 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

cheerfulness, Jewish on his father's side, Turkish by 
the fez he wore and a life spent in guiding strangers 
about Constantinople. He had the face of a dean of 
a diplomatic corps or one of those comfortable old 
gentlemen in spats who have become fixtures in some 
city club. 

It was his employer's humor to befriend and defend 
him in private, but to his face assume, with the most 
delicate irony, that this marvel among men was always 
late, forgetful, rattle-brained, and credulous. And it 
was Levy's gift to play up to this assumption, to hang 
on his employer's words with breathless anxiety, to 
relax into a paternal smile when safe, and to support 
his omelets and his delays with oaths and circumlo- 
cutions stranger even than the dishes themselves. 
They were odd enough, those dinners, sitting in our 
little oasis of light in that deserted town, not knowing 
what the next hour might bring. 

Next day we again went to Lapsaki, and, although 
the entire industrial resources of the place had appar- 
ently been cornered in the meantime by a Dardanelles 
Jew, returned with several more mattresses and the 
promise of the remainder. We found the hostages 
more cheerful. With the relief money Philip had dis- 
tributed the day before, and the food they had been 
able to buy, they had shaken themselves together, 
gifted cooks had turned up, they had made a baseball 
out of rags, painted humorous signs on the doorways 
of their rooms — they had actually begun to sing. 

And now, with that curious subsequentness with 

190 




The Secretary of the American Embassy and the incomparable Levy at 

Lapsaki. 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

which things sometimes happen in Turkey, the mutes- 
sarif discovered half a dozen mattresses himself, and 
announced that to-morrow there would be enough for 
all. Nay, more — the government would allow each 
hostage four piasters a day for food, a cook would be 
brought down from Constantinople and meals served 
in a restaurant, that they might be saved, as his secre- 
tary observed, from the unlovely "odeurs de cuisine. 11 

Then it was discovered that the men might stroll 
about town, provided they were in groups. They went 
to the beach and discussed the feasibility of swimming, 
they even demurred against the Constantinople cook 
as limiting their means of amusing themselves; the 
aesthetic young man recovered now, polished his shoes 
and put a lavender handkerchief in his breast pocket. 
The hostages were in a fair way to annex the deserted 
village, when a bombshell burst in the shape of a 
despatch from the American ambassador that permis- 
sion had been obtained for all to come home. 

The changing wind now swung full upon us. Scarcely 
had the message arrived ere the mutessarif s secretary 
followed it, lamenting that we must go. A peacock 
reposing majestically in the arms of a patient hamal 
appeared at the front door, a souvenir for "his excel- 
lency. " 

Appeared also, out of thin air, a neat little horse 
and phaeton, and a trooper perched on a high Turkish 
saddle, with a rifle slung rakishly across his back, and 
the bey himself, glasses, fez, and all, astride an Arab 
steed. We were to be taken for a drive. Toward 

191 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

the end of it we reached the flour-mill, the only modern 
edifice in this ancient town, and were ushered into the 
office to sit in a constrained circle, with the slightly 
ironical-looking young proprietor — accustomed, per- 
haps, to such visits — and his associates, while coffee 
and cigarettes were brought. The engineer, an Italian, 
welcomed us in French; the proprietor, who spoke 
nothing but Turkish, smiled inscrutably; and overhead, 
in several brass cages, canaries sang. 

Philip, gazing upward, admired their song, whereat 
the bey at once announced that they were his. The 
American protested that, much as the gift delighted 
his taste and roused his gratitude, it was impossible to 
think of carrying a canary back to Constantinople. 

"If you please . . ." insisted the imperturbable 
bey. "It is yours!" Scarcely had we returned, in- 
deed, before another patient hamal knocked, lugging 
the hapless bird. 

The hostages, not to be outdone, invited Philip, the 
bey, and ourselves to lunch. There was chicken soup 
and chicken, and salad and native wine, and, for the 
corner of the improvised table, where the guests were 
seated, the hospitable young men had actually pro- 
cured several bottles of Gallipoli champagne. The 
barber with the poetic beard leaped to his feet, as fluent 
in welcoming us as he had been in protestations a few 
evenings before, while the aesthetic young man smiled 
pensively down at a long-stemmed fleur-de-lis which he 
slowly twirled in his fingers. The cashier of a Con- 
stantinople department store sang from "Tosca." 

192 



THE FIFTY HOSTAGES 

With him as leader they all sang — a song of the Pyre- 
nees mountaineers, then a waltz from the cafes chan- 
tants: 

" Bien gentiment Von se balade 
C'est la premiere 'promenade — " 

In another week we should have had a Gallipoli Glee 
Club. 

And so ended the adventure of the fifty hostages, 
who went out to be shot at — the end of the comedy, 
which had its climax at the beginning. The next 
morning we were up at daylight, and after several 
hours' delay the mutessarif and his lieutenant came 
down to permit us to leave. There were cigarettes 
and salutes, the secretary scribbled in Turkish char- 
acters on his knee, the governor signed the permit, 
and we said good-by to Gallipoli. Next morning we 
again threaded the shipping in the Golden Horn. 
The ten policemen who had looked so formidable a 
week before, expressed a wish for what was left of the 
tinned corned beef. And with hackmen yelling from 
the street and caique men shouting from the water, 
the fifty hostages were swallowed up in the sunshine 
and smells and clatter of Constantinople. 



193 



XI 

WITH THE TURKS AT THE DARDANELLES 

The little side-wheeler — she had been built in Glasgow 
in 1892, and done duty as a Bosporus ferry-boat 
until the war began — was supposed to sail at four, but 
night shut down and she still lay at the wharf in 
Stamboul. We contrived to get some black bread, 
hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and helva from one of the 
little hole-in-the-wall shops near by, watched Pera 
and its ascending roofs turn to purple, and the purple 
to gray and black, until Constantinople was but a 
string of lights across Galata Bridge, and a lamp here 
and there on the hills. Then, toward midnight, with 
lights doused and life-belts strung along the rail — for 
English submarines were in the Marmora — we churned 
quietly round the corner of Stamboul and into the cool 
sea. 

The side-wheeler was bound for the Dardanelles 
with provisions for the army — bread in bags, big ham- 
pers of green beans, and cigarettes — and among them 
we were admitted by grace of the minister of war, and 
papers covered with seals and Turkish characters, 
which neither of us could read. We tried to curl up 
on top of the beans (for the Marmora is cold at night, 
and the beans still held some of the warmth of the 

194 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

fields), but in the end took to blankets and the bare 
decks. 

All night we went chunking southward — it is well 
over a hundred miles from Constantinople to the upper 
entrance to the straits — and shook ourselves out of our 
blankets and the cinders into another of those blue- 
and-gold mornings which belong to this part of the 
world. You must imagine it behind all this strange 
fighting at the Dardanelles — sunshine and blue water, 
a glare which makes the Westerner squint; moons that 
shine like those in the tropics. One cannot send a 
photograph of it home any more than I could photo- 
graph the view from my hotel window here on Pera 
Hill of Stamboul and the Golden Horn. You would 
have the silhouette, but you could not see the sunshine 
blazing on white mosques and minarets, the white 
mosques blazing against terra-cotta roofs and dusty 
green cedars and cypresses, the cypresses lifting dark 
and pensive shafts against the blue — all that splendid, 
exquisite radiance which bursts through one's window 
shutters every morning and makes it seem enough to 
look and a waste of time to try to think. 

It is the air the gods and heroes used to breathe; 
they fought and played, indeed, over these very waters 
and wind-swept hills. Leander swam the Dardanelles 
(or Hellespont) close to where the Irresistible and 
Bouvet were sunk; the wind that blew in our faces 
that morning was the same that rippled the drapeiy 
of the Winged Victory. As we went chunking south- 
ward with our beans and cigarettes, we could see the 

195 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

snows of Olympus — the Mysian Olympus, at any rate, 
if not the one where Jove, the cloud-compelling, used 
to live, and white-armed Juno, and Pallas, Blue-Eyed 
Maid. If only our passports had taken us to Troy 
we could have looked down the plains of Ilium to the 
English and French ships, and Australian and French 
colonials fighting up the hillside across the bay. 

We got tea from the galley, and with bread and 
helva (an insinuating combination of sugar and oil of 
sesame, which tastes of peanuts and is at once a 
candy and a sort of substitute for butter or meat) 
made out a breakfast. 

A Turkish soldier, the only other occupant of the 
deck, surveyed these preparations impassively; then, 
taking off his boots, climbed on a settee and stood 
there in his big bare feet, with folded hands, facing, as 
he thought, toward Mecca. The boat was headed 
southwest, and he looked to starboard, so that he faced, 
as a matter of fact, nearly due west. He had knelt 
and touched his forehead twice to the bench, and was 
going on with the Mussulman prayer when the captain, 
a rather elegant young man who had served in the 
navy, murmured something as he passed. The sol- 
dier looked round thoughtfully; without embarrass- 
ment, surprise, or hurry stepped from the settee, 
pointed it toward the Asiatic shore, and, stepping up 
again, resumed his devotions. 

Five times that day, as the faithful are commanded, 
he said his prayer — a sight that followed us every- 
where that week. One evening after dusk, on another 

196 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

boat, a fireman came up from below, climbed on a 
settee, and began his prayer. Several passengers, who 
had not seen him in the dark, walked in front of him. 
He broke off, reviled them in true fire-room style, then 
with a wide gesture, as though sweeping the air clear 
ahead of him all the way to the holy city, began at the 
beginning again. Soldiers up in the Gallipoli hills, 
the captain on the bridge, a stevedore working on a 
lighter in the blaze of noon with the winch engines 
squealing round him — you turn round to find a man, 
busy the moment before, standing like a statue, hands 
folded in front of him, facing the east. Nothing stops 
him; no one seems to see him; he stands invisible 
in the visible world — in a world apart, indeed, to 
which the curious, self-conscious Westerner is not ad- 
mitted, where, doubtless, he is no more than the dust 
which the other shakes from his feet before he is fit 
to address his God. 

The Marmora narrowed, we passed Gallipoli on the 
European side, where the English and French hostages 
had had their curious adventure the week before, and 
on into the Dardanelles proper and the zone of war. 
It was some forty miles down this salt-water river 
(four miles wide at its widest, and between the forts of 
Chanak Kale and Kilid Bahr, near its lower end, a 
fraction over a mile) from the Marmora gateway to 
the iEgean. On the left were Lapsaki and the green 
hills of Asia, cultivated to their very tops; on the right 
Europe and the brown hills of the peninsula, now filled 
with guns and horses and men. 

197 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

Over there, up that narrow strip of Europe, running 
down between the Dardanelles and the iEgean, the 
Allies had been trying for weeks to force their way to 
Constantinople. They had begun in February, you 
will recall, when they bombarded the forts at the outer 
entrance to the Dardanelles — Sedd ul Bahr on the Euro- 
pean side, at the tip of the peninsula, and Kum Kale, 
across the bay on the Asiatic shore. These forts oc- 
cupy somewhat the relation to Constantinople that 
Sandy Hook does to New York, although much far- 
ther away — they face, that is to say, the open sea, and 
the guns of the fleet, heavier than those of the old 
forts, could stand off at a safe distance and demolish 
them. 

When the ships pushed on up the strait toward 
Kilid Bahr and Chanak Kale — somewhat like trying 
to run the Narrows at New York — there was a different 
story. They were now within range of shore batteries 
and there were anchored mines and mines sent down 
on the tide. On March 18 the Irresistible, Ocean, and 
Bouvet were sunk, and it began to be apparent that 
the Dardanelles could not be forced without the help 
of a powerful land force. So in April landing parties 
were sent ashore: at Kum Kale and Sedd ul Bahr, at 
Kaba Tepe and Ari Burnu, some twelve or fourteen 
miles farther north on the iEgean side of the peninsula, 
and at another point a few miles farther up. At Sedd 
ul Bahr and along the beach between Kaba Tepe and 
Ari Burnu the Allies made their landing good, dug 
themselves in, and, reinforced by the fire of the ships, 

198 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

began a trench warfare not unlike that which has 
dragged on in the west. 

The peninsula is but ten or twelve miles wide at its 
widest, and the Dardanelles side is within range of 
the fleet's great guns, firing clear overland from the 
iEgean. It was by this indirect fire that Maidos was 
destroyed and Gallipoli partly smashed and emptied 
of its people. There were places toward the end of the 
peninsula where Turkish infantrymen had to huddle 
in their trenches under fire of this sort coming from 
three directions. Whenever the invaders had it be- 
hind they were naturally at an advantage; whenever 
it ceased they were likely to be driven back. The 
Turks, on the other hand, had the advantage of 
numbers, of fighting on an "inside line," and of a 
country, one hill rising behind another, on the defense 
of which depended their existence as a nation in 
Europe. 

Under these conditions the fighting had been going 
on for weeks, the English and French holding their 
ground at Sedd ul Bahr and Ari Burnu, but getting no 
nearer Constantinople. And as we went chunking down 
the strait that night and into Ak-Bash in the dark, 
two new forces were coming in. The next day a Ger- 
man submarine — come all the way round through the 
Mediterranean — was to sink the Triumph and the 
Majestic, while another American correspondent, who 
had intended to come with us but took the transport 
Nagara instead, saw the head of an English submarine 
poke through the Marmora. A blond young man in 

199 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

overalls and white jersey climbed out of the conning- 
tower. 

"Will you give us time to get off?" cried the Ameri- 
can, the only one on board who could speak English. 

"Yes," said the young man, "and be damned quick 
about it." Ten minutes later, from the boats into 
which they had tumbled, the passengers saw a cloud 
of yellow smoke, and the Nagara simply disintegrated 
and sank, and with her the heavy siege-gun she was 
taking to the Dardanelles. 

Pleasantly unaware of what might as well have hap- 
pened to the bread and beans, we drew up to a hill- 
side speckled with lights, a wharf, and a hospital boat 
smelling of iodoform, through a cabin window of which 
a doctor was peacefully eating dinner. Boxes and 
sacks were piled near the wharf, and from over be- 
hind the hills, with startling nearness, came the ner- 
vous Crack . . . crack . . . crack-crack-crack! of rifle 
and machine-gun fire. 

We went to sleep to the tune of it, moved a few miles 
down the coast in the night, and crawled out into a 
world of dusty brown — brown hillsides and camels and 
soldiers and sacks of wheat piled on the flat, im- 
mersed in an amber dawn. This was the destination 
of the side-wheeler, and by sunup we were loaded into 
a mahone with a horse, several goats, three or four 
passengers, and four barefooted boatmen, who pushed 
us over the strait to Chanak Kale. 

We were now at the narrowest part of the Darda- 
nelles, behind us, on the European side, the old round 

200 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

tower of Kilid Bahr and Medjidie Fort, in front Fort 
Hamidie, and on the horizon to the south, where the 
strait opened into the sea, the tiny silhouettes of sev- 
eral of the Allies' ships. Chanak was smashed like 
the towns in west Belgium, and, but for the garrison 
and the Turkish and German commandants tucked 
away in the trees, all but deserted, except by flies and 
half-starved cats. These unhappy creatures, left be- 
hind in the flight, were everywhere, and in front of the 
bake shop they crowded in literal scores — gaunt, 
mangy, clawed and battered from constant fights. It 
was hot, there was little to eat, and after hours of wran- 
gling it appeared that our precious scratches of Turk- 
ish took us to the Gallipoli instead of the Asiatic side. 
The two were under different jurisdictions; though the 
fault was not ours, the local commandant had the right 
to ship us back to Constantinople, and after a sort of 
delirium of flies, cats, gendarmes, muggy heat, and 
debates, night descended to find us going to sleep in 
the middle of a vegetable farm, in a house lately inhab- 
ited by whirling dervishes, with two lynx-eyed police- 
men in gray lamb's-wool caps seated at the gate. By 
them we were marched next day to the wharf and sud- 
denly there translated into the upper ether by the 
German admiral and his thoughtful aid, who, on their 
way to the headquarters of the land forces across the 
strait, whirled us over in style in a torpedo-boat. 

We landed at the same place at which we had 
touched in the dark two nights before — busy and blaz- 
ing now in the afternoon sun, with gangs of stevedores 

201 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

shuffling to and from the ships at the brand-new 
wharfs, Turkish officers galloping about on their 
thick-necked, bobtailed, fiery little stallions, and the 
dusty flat, half a mile across, perhaps, between its en- 
circling hills, crowded with ox and horse carts, camel 
trains, and piles of ammunition-boxes and sacks of 
food. 

The admiral and his aid were greeted by a smart 
young German officer with a monocle, and galloped 
off into the hills, w T hile we fell into the hospitable 
hands of another German, a civilian volunteer in red 
fez and the blue and brass buttons of the merchant 
marine, cast here by the chance of war. 

He w r as a Hamburg-American captain, lately sailing 
between Buenos Aires and Hamburg, and before that 
on an Atlas Line boat between the Caribbean and 
New York. He talked English and seemed more 
than half American, indeed, and when he spoke of the 
old Chelsea Hotel, just across the street from the 
Y. M. C. A. gymnasium in which I had played hand- 
ball, we were almost back in Twenty-third Street. 
He took us up to his tent on the hill, overlooking the 
men and stores, and, he explained, reasonably safe from 
the aeroplanes which flew over several times a day. 
Over his cigarettes and tea and bottled beer we talked 
of war and the world. 

It was the captain's delicate and arduous duty to 
impose his tight German habits of work and ship- 
shapeness on camel drivers, stevedores, and officials 
used to the looser, more leisurely methods of the East. 

202 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

He could not speak Turkish, was helpless without his 
interpreter, at best a civilian among soldiers — men 
have got Iron Crosses for easier jobs than that ! 

He talked of the news — great news for his side — 
of the Triumph, and, opening his navy list, made a 
pencil mark. 

"She's off!" he said. The book was full of marks. 
In methodical sailor fashion he had been crossing them 
off since the war began : British and German — Bliicher, 
Scharnhorst, Irresistible, Goliath, and the rest — mil- 
lions of dollars and hundreds of men at a stroke. 

" Where's it going to end ? " he demanded. " There's 
seven hundred good men gone, maybe — how many did 
the Triumph carry? And we think it's good news! 
If a man should invent something that would kill a 
hundred thousand men at once, he'd be a great man. 
. . . Now, what is that?" 

The English were hanging on to Sedd ul Bahr — 
they might try to make another Gibraltar of it. Their 
aeroplanes came up every day. There was a French- 
man with a long tail — he only came to the edge of the 
camp, and as soon as the batteries opened up turned 
back, but the Englishman didn't stop for anything. 
He dropped a bomb or two every time he passed — one 
man must have been square under one, for they found 
pieces of him, but never did find his head. It wasn't 
so much the bomb that did the damage; it was the 
stones blown out by the explosion. If you were stand- 
ing anywhere within sixty feet when it went off, 
you were likely to be killed. The captain had had 

203 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

trenches dug all over camp into which they could jump 
— had one for himself just outside the tent. All you 
hoped for when one of those fellows was overhead and 
the shrapnel chasing after him was that the next one 
would take him fair and square and bring him down. 
Yet that fellow took his life in his hands every time he 
flew over. "He's fighting for his country, too!" the 
captain sighed. 

It was our first duty to present ourselves to the com- 
mandant of the peninsular forces, Field-Marshal Liman 
von Sanders — Liman Pasha, as he is generally called 
in Turkey — and the captain found a carriage, presently, 
and sent us away with a soldier guard. Our carriage 
was a talika, one of those little gondola-like covered 
wagons common in the country. There is a seat for 
the driver; the occupants He on the floor and adjust 
themselves as best they can to the bumpings of the 
hilly roads. 

The country reminded one of parts of our own 
West — brown hills, with sparse pines and scrub-oaks, 
meadows ablaze with scarlet poppies, and over all blue 
sky, sunshine, and the breeze from the near-by sea. 
We passed camel trains, mule trains, horses, and tents 
masked with brush. Here evidently were the men we 
had seen marching day after day through the Con- 
stantinople streets — marching away to war in the silent 
Eastern fashion, without a waving handkerchief, a 
girl to say good-by to, or a cheer. Here they were 
and yet here they weren't, for the brush and tangled 
hills swallowed them up as thoroughly as armies are 
swallowed up in the villages of Belgium and France. 

204 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

We passed even these signs of war and came into 
pines and open meadows — we might have been driving 
to somebody's trout preserve. The wagon stopped 
near a sign tacked to a tree, and we walked down a 
winding path into a thicket of pines. There were 
tents set in the bank and covered with boughs, and out 
of one came a tall, square-jawed German officer, but- 
toning his coat. He waved aside our passports with 
the air of one not concerned with such details, asked 
if we spoke German — or perhaps we would prefer 
French? — and, motioning down the path to a sort of 
summer-house with a table and chairs, told an orderly 
to bring tea. 

This was the headquarters of the Fifth Army, and 
this the commander-in-chief. A bird-man might have 
flown over the neighborhood a dozen times without 
guessing that they were there. We were hidden in the 
pines, and only an occasional far-off Br-r-rum-m! 
from the cannons in the south broke the stillness. 

Some one had brought up a cask of native claret 
from Chanak, and the field-marshal's staff were helping 
to put it into the bank in front of the arbor. A pro- 
fessor of chemistry — until the war called him back to 
the colors — was shovelling and showing the Turkish 
soldiers how the cask should be slanted; another of 
the superintendents had lived for ten years in America, 
and was enthusiastic over the charms and future of 
Davenport, Iowa. Presently tea came, and thin little 
sandwiches and cigars, and over these the commander- 
in-chief spoke with complete cheerfulness of the gen- 
eral situation. 

205 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The English and French could not force the Dar- 
danelles; no more could they advance on land, and 
now that the submarines had arrived, the fleet, which 
had been bothersome, would be taken care of. He 
spoke with becoming sorrow of the behavior of Italy, 
and did not mar this charming little fete champetre 
with any remarks about American shipments of arms. 
The ex-banker from Davenport also spoke of the 
Italians, and with a rather disconcerting vigor, con- 
sidering that they were recent allies. The young aide- 
de-camp whom we had seen at the wharf declared that 
the Turkish soldier was the best in the world. It 
was a very different army from that which had been 
defeated in the Balkan War, and the endurance and 
tenacity of the individual soldier were beyond any- 
thing he had ever seen. A man would see a dozen of 
his comrades killed alongside him by a high-explosive 
shell and only shrug his shoulders and say that now, 
at any rate, they were all in paradise. 

One continually hears similar comments, and there 
can be no doubt of the Turkish soldier's bravery, and 
his unusual ability to endure hardship. No one who 
has wrangled with a minor Turkish official, and ex- 
perienced the impassive resistance he is able to inter- 
pose to anything he doesn't want to do, will under- 
estimate what this quality might become, translated 
into the rugged physique and impassivity of the com- 
mon soldier. 

Westerners have heard so long of the Sick Man of 
Europe and his imminent decease that they are likely 

206 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

to associate political with physical weakness, and think 
that the pale, brooding, official type, familiar in pho- 
tographs, is the every-day Turk. As a matter of fact, 
the every-day Turk is tough-bodied and tough-spirited, 
used to hard living and hard work. The soldiers you 
see swinging up Pera Hill or in from a practice march, 
dust-covered and sweating, and sending out through 
the dusty cedars a wailing sort of chant as they come 
— these are as splendid-looking fellows as you will see 
in any army in Europe. 

They are dressed in businesslike fashion in dust- 
colored woollen tunics and snug breeches with puttees, 
and wear a rather rakish-looking folded cap — a sort of 
conventionalized turban not unlike the soldier hats 
children make by folding newspapers. This protects 
the eyes and the back of the neck from the sun. They 
are strong and well made, with broad, high cheek- 
bones, a black mustache generally, and hawk eyes. 
Some look as the Tartar warriors who swept over east- 
ern Europe must have looked; some, with their good- 
natured faces and vigorous compactness, remind one 
of Japanese infantrymen. 

During the early fighting on the peninsula the 
wounded came up to Constantinople, after days on the 
way, in wagons, perhaps, over horrible roads, in com- 
mandeered ferry-boats and freighters, yet one scarcely 
heard a sound, a murmur of complaint. Gray and 
gaunt, with the mud of the trenches still on them, they 
would be helped into ambulances and driven off to 
the hospitals, silent themselves and through crowds 

207 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

as silent as those which had watched them march away 
a few weeks before. 

From that little oasis in the pines we drove with a 
pass, signed by the field-marshal himself, taking us to 
the heights above Ari Burnu, to a point near the south 
front, a hill in the centre of the peninsula, from which 
we could see both the Dardanelles and the ^Egean, and 
to a camp beneath it, where we were to spend the night. 

It was dark when our wagon lurched into this camp, 
and a full hour passed before the baffled Turks could 
convince themselves that our pass and we were all 
that they should be, and put us into a tent. Never- 
theless, an orderly poked his head in good-naturedly 
enough at seven next morning with tea and goat's 
cheese and brown bread, and our captain host, a rather 
wildish-looking young man from the Asiatic interior, 
came to say he had telephoned for permission to take 
us to the heights above Kaba Tepe and Ari Burnu. 

The camp was the office, so to speak, of the division 
commander, with his clerks, telephone operator, com- 
missary machinery, and so on, the commander himself 
living at the immediate front. It was like scores of 
other camps hidden away in the hills — brush-covered 
tents dug into the hillsides, looking like rather faded 
summer-houses; arbor-like horse-sheds, covered with 
branches, hidden in ravines; every wagon, gun, or 
piece of material that might offer a target to an aero- 
plane covered with brush. They were even painting 
gray horses that morning with a brown dye. A big 
38-centimeter unexploded shell, dropped into a near-by 

208 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

village by the Queen Elizabeth, and with difficulty 
pushed up on end now by a dozen men, was shown us, 
and presently we climbed into the carriage with the 
captain, and went rocking over the rough road toward 
the iEgean. 

The country reminded one of the California foot- 
hills in the dry season, and me, particularly, of Hon- 
duras and the road from the Pacific up to Tegucigalpa 
— gravelly brown hills and tangled valleys with sparse 
pines and scrub-oaks; rocky slopes down which tinkled 
brown and white flocks of sheep and goats; sunshine 
and scarlet poppies and fresh wind; and over all a 
curious, quiet, busy web of war; a long shoulder, 
sharp against the blue, with a brown camel train am- 
bling down it; a ravine with its arbor-like shelters for 
cavalry; wounded soldiers in carts, or riding when they 
were able to ride; now and then an officer on his cranky 
little stallion — the whole countryside bristling with 
defense. 

Up one of the hot little valleys we climbed, left the 
carriage, and, walking up a trail, cut into the bank, past 
men and horses hidden away like bandits, and came 
at last to the top and several tents dug into the rim 
of the hill. It was the headquarters of Essad Pasha, 
defender of Janina in the last war, and division com- 
mander in this sector of the front. He received us 
in his tent beside a table littered with maps and 
papers — a grizzled, good-natured soldier, who addressed 
us in German, and might indeed have passed for a 
German. He apologized for the cramped quarters, 

209 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

explaining that they were likely at any time to be bom- 
barded, and had to live in what was practically a 
trench, and then at once, in the Turkish fashion, ap- 
peared an orderly with tiny cups of sweet coffee. 

Things were quiet at the moment, he said. There 
was nothing but the desultory crack-crack of snipers, 
coming from one knew not just where, the' every-day 
voice of the trenches — possibly the enemy were dis- 
mayed by the loss of the Triumph. He had seen it 
all, he said, from this very spot — a sight one was not 
likely to see more than once in a lifetime. The great 
ship had rolled over like a stricken whale. Her tor- 
pedo-nets were out, and as she turned over these nets 
closed down on the men struggling in the water, and 
swept them under. He, too, expressed entire confidence 
in the Turk's ability to stop any farther advance and, 
calling an aid, sent us to the periscope, which poked 
its two eyes through a screen of pine branches a few 
yards away, and looked over the parapet and down on 
the first-line trenches and the sea. 

We were high above the iEgean and opposite the 
island of Imbros, which lifted its hazy blue on the 
western horizon, and was used as a base by part of 
the fleet. To the south rose the promontory of Kaba 
Tepe, cleared of the enemy now, our Turkish major 
said, and, stretching northward from it past us and 
Ari Burnu, the curving rim of beach held by the 
English. 

More than a month had passed since the landing, 
and the heavy fighting of the next few days, in which 

210 




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a S 






AT THE DARDANELLES 

the Australians and New Zealanders, under a hail of 
shrapnel churning up the water between ships and 
shore, succeeded in getting a foothold; a month and 
more had passed, and, though they still held their 
ground, apparently they could do no more. The yel- 
low line of their first trench twisted along the rim of 
the hill below us, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and 
directly behind it lay the blue sea. How much elbow- 
room they might have between their trenches and the 
water one could not tell, so completely foreshortened 
was the space between. Cliffs rise from a narrow strip 
of foreshore here, however, and apparently they had 
pushed just over the cliff rim — the first hill above the 
sea. Their tents, stores and landing-places were out 
of sight. 

Directly in front of the English trenches were the 
first-line Turkish trenches, in some places not more than 
fifteen or twenty feet away, so close, indeed, that 
when there was fighting they must have fought with 
revolvers, hand-grenades, shovels, anything they could 
lay their hands on. At the moment it was quiet but 
for the constant Crack . . . crack-crack! of snipers. 
We could look down on the backs and heads of the 
Turkish soldiers; except for a wisp of smoke rising here 
and there from some hidden camp cook-stove, there 
was not a sign of life in the English trenches. Snipers 
were attending to that. Even here, in the second-line 
trenches on top of the second hill, no one was allowed 
to show his head, and it was all the more curious to 
see a squad of Turkish soldiers digging away below as 

211 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

calmly as so many market-gardeners in a potato-field 
They were running another trench behind the several 
that already lined the slope, and must have been hid- 
den by a rise of ground, though looking down from 
above they seemed to be out in the open. 

The position of the English did not seem enviable. 
They had trenches directly in front of them, and sev- 
eral hundred feet above them a second line (from which 
we were looking) dominating the whole neighborhood 
The first-line Turkish trenches were too close to their 
own to be bombarded from the ships, so that that pre- 
h'minary advantage was cut off; the second-line de- 
fenses, in the twisting gullies over the hill, could stand 
bombardment about as well as could trenches any- 
where — and behind them was the water. They were 
very literally between the devil and the deep sea. 

With the periscope we worked from Kaba Tepe on 
the left clear across the ground in front of us to the 
north. Over in the west, by hazy Imbros, were five 
or six ships; there was another fleet in the north to- 
ward the Gulf of Saros, and little black beetles of de- 
stroyers crawled here and there across the blue sea floor. 
The major took us into his tent for cigarettes and 
another thimbleful of the coffee. He, too, had been 
educated in Germany, spoke German and French, and 
with his quick, bright eyes and soft smile, would easily 
have passed for a Frenchman or Italian. 

They had just had a seven hours' armistice to bury 
the dead and bring in the wounded, some of whom 
had been lying between the trenches for a week. The 

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AT THE DARDANELLES 

English had proposed the armistice; an officer had 
come out from each side, and they had had a long pow- 
wow and drawn up a written agreement with metic- 
ulous care lest there should be a misunderstanding or 
danger of breaking the truce. Everything, the major 
said, had been most good-natured and correct. The 
English had sent a "diplomat" in addition to their 
military delegate, a civilian whom he had known well 
in Constantinople. It was altogether quaint and in- 
teresting, meeting and talking with this man, with 
whom he might, so to speak, have been playing bridge 
the night before — 1 1 Sehr nett ! Sehr nett / " he said with 
his soft smile. 

While he was waiting to receive the English dele- 
gate, five shrapnel-shells had been fired at him, he 
said; but he understood that it was a mistake and 
made no protest, and during the truce a wounded 
Turk had refused to take the water an English officer 
had tried to give him, firing at the Englishman instead. 
A little fanatical, perhaps, but then — and again the 
major smiled in his charming way — "a little fanati- 
cism in one's soldiers is a good thing !" 

No, one didn't care to be hanging on to that strip 
of beach with those Australians and New Zealanders. 

We drove back to camp for lunch, which we had in 
the captain's little brush-covered balcony, set into the 
hill. He did not eat, but showed us his photograph, 
very smooth and dapper, compared with his bristling 
service face, taken with his two children, one a little 
girl and the other a grave little boy, with a face like 

213 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

a miniature pasha. The captain came from the Asiatic 
side, near Broussa, on the slopes of Olympus, and was 
all Turk, without any foreign frills or a word of Eng- 
lish, German, or French. He took no lunch, but ate 
some of the helva left over from Stamboul, and then 
started with us up the hill behind the camp. This 
was about midway in the peninsula, and, facing south 
from the summit, we looked down over the twist- 
ing hills, pockmarked with holes from shells and 
aeroplane bombs, to the Marmora on the left, and on 
the right to the iEgean and hazy Imbros, and, in front, 
almost to the end of the peninsula. The sun was 
down in the west, and in its track a cruiser steamed a 
mile or two out from the coast, while from under Ari 
Burnu, where we had been that morning, a transport 
put out, rather recklessly it seemed, and went straight 
across the open water. From the south and west there 
was the continual Br-r-um-m . . . br-r-um-m! of big 
guns, and over Kaba Tepe way we could see shells 
bursting. We sat there for an hour or so, waiting for 
one of the little specks out on the blue sea floor to fire 
or sink, and then, as nothing happened, returned to 
camp. 

An orderly brought us supper that night — mutton, 
bread and cheese, haricots, stewed fruit, and coffee — 
and we dined on a little table outside the tent, with 
the twilight turning to moonlight and the sheep-bells 
tinkling against the opposite hill. Soldiers were carry- 
ing their suppers from the cook tent — not at all the 
bread-and-cigarette diet with which one is always 

214 



AT THE DARDANELLES 

being told the hardy Turk is content. He may be 
content, but whenever I saw him eating he had meat 
and rice, and often stewed fresh beans or fruit — cer- 
tainly better food than most Turkish peasants or arti- 
sans are accustomed to at home. 

I sat outside watching the moon rise and listening 
to the distant Crack . . . crack-crack! of rifle and 
machine-gun fire from over Ari Burnu way. Evi- 
dently they were fighting in the trenches we had seen 
that morning. The orderly who had served us, with- 
drawn a little way, was standing like a statue in the 
dusk, hands folded in front of him, saying his last 
prayer of the evening. Beyond, from a bush-covered 
tent, came the jingle of a telephone and the singsong 
voice of the young Turkish operator relaying messages 
in German — "Ja ! . . . J a ! . . . Kaba Tepe . . . Ousedom 
Pasha . . . Morgen frith . . . Hier Multepe ! . . . Ja ! 
. . . Ja!" And to this and the distant rattle of 
battle we went to sleep. 



215 



XII 

SOGHAN-DERE AND THE FLIER OF 
AK-BASH 

Next morning, after news had been telephoned in 
that the submarines had got another battleship, the 
Majestic, we climbed again into the covered wagon and 
started for the south front. We drove down to the 
sea and along the beach road through Maidos — bom- 
barded several weeks before, cross-country from the 
iEgean, and nothing now but bare, burnt walls — on 
to Kilid Bahr, jammed with camels and ox-carts and 
soldiers, and then on toward the end of the peninsula. 
We were now beyond the Narrows and the Dar- 
danelles. To the left, a bit farther out, were the waters 
in which the Irresistible, Ocean, and Bouvet were sunk, 
and even now, off the point, ten or twelve miles away, 
hung the smoke of sister ships. We drove past the 
big guns of the forts, past field-guns covering the shore, 
past masked batteries and search-lights. Beside us, 
along the shore road, mule trains and ox-carts and camel 
trains were toiling along in the blaze and dust with 
provisions and ammunition for the front. Once we 
passed four soldiers carrying a comrade, badly wounded, 
on a stretcher padded with leaves. After an hour or 
so of bumping we turned into a transverse valley, as 
level almost as if it had been made for a parade-ground. 

216 



SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

High hills protected it north and south; a little stream 
ran down the centre — it might have been made for a 
storage base and camp. More brush-covered tents 
and arbors for horses were strung along the hillside, 
one above the other sometimes, in half a dozen ter- 
races. We drove into the valley, got out and followed 
the orderly to a brush-covered arbor, closed on every 
side but one, out of which came a well set-up, bronzed, 
bright-eyed man of fifty or thereabout who welcomed 
us like long-lost friends. 

It was Colonel Shukri Bey, commander of the Fif- 
teenth Division. We were the first correspondents 
who had pushed thus far, and as novel to him appar- 
ently as he was charming to us. He invited us into 
the little arbor; coffee was brought and then tea, and, 
speaking German to Suydam and French to me, he 
talked of the war in general and the operations at the 
end of the peninsula with the greatest good humor and 
apparent confidence in the ultimate result. 

Our talk was continually punctuated by the rumble 
of the big guns over the plateau to the south. "That's 
ours" . . . "That's theirs," he would explain; and 
presently, with a young aide-de-camp as guide, we 
climbed out of the valley and started down the plateau 
toward Sedd ul Bahr. 

The Allies' foothold here was much wider than that 
at Ari Burnu. In the general landing operations of 
April 25 and 26 (one force was sent ashore in a large 
collier, from which, after she was beached, the men 
poured across anchored lighters to the shore) the Eng- 

217 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

lish and French had established themselves in Sedd ul 
Bahr itself and along the cliffs on either side. This 
position was strengthened during the weeks of fighting 
which followed until they appeared to be pretty firmly 
fixed on the end of the peninsula, with a front running 
clear across it in a general northwest line, several kilo- 
ometres in from the point. The valley we had just 
left was Soghan-Dere, about seven miles from Sedd ul 
Bahr, and the plateau across which we were walking 
led, on the right, up to a ridge from which one could 
look down on the whole battle-field, or, to the left, 
straight down into the battle itself. 

The sun was getting down in the west by this time, 
down the road from camp men were carrying kettles of 
soup and rice pilaf to their comrades in the trenches, 
and from the end of the plateau came continuous thun- 
dering and the Crack . . . crack . . . crack! of in- 
fantry fire. The road was strewn with fragments of 
shells from previous bombardments, and our solicitous 
young lieutenant, fearing we might draw fire, pulled 
us behind a bush for a minute or two, whenever the 
aeroplane, flying back and forth in the west, seemed 
to be squinting at us. The enemy could see so little, 
he said, that whenever they saw anything at all they 
fired twenty shots at it on principle. For two miles, 
perhaps, we walked, until from the innocent-looking 
chaparral behind us there was a roar, and a shell 
wailed away over our heads out into the distance. 

We could see the end of the peninsula, where the 
coast curves round from Eski Hissarlik toward Sedd 

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SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

ul Bahr, and two of the enemy's cruisers steaming 
slowly back and forth under the cliffs, firing, presum- 
ably, as they steamed. Now they were hidden under 
the shore, now they came in view, and opposite Eski 
Hissarlik swung round and steamed west again. In 
front of us, just over the edge of the plateau which 
there began to slope downward, were the trenches of 
the Turks' left wing, now under bombardment. The 
ridge just hid the shells as they struck, but we could 
see the smoke from each, now a tall black column, like 
the "Jack Johnsons" of the west, now a yellowish 
cloud that hung long afterward like fog — and with it 
the continuous rattle of infantry fire. Several fliers 
were creeping about far up against the blue, looking 
for just such hidden batteries as that which kept bark- 
ing behind us, and out in front and to the right came 
the low Br — r — um — ml of heavy guns. 

Fighting like this had been going on for weeks, the 
ships having the advantage of their big guns by day, 
the Turks recovering themselves, apparently, at night. 
They were on their own ground — a succession of ridges, 
one behind the other — and they could not only always 
see, but generally looked down on, an enemy who could 
not, generally, see them. And the enemy's men, sup- 
plies, perhaps even his water — for this is a dry coun- 
try at all times, and after June there are almost no 
rains — must come from his ships. If English sub- 
marines were in the Marmora, so, too, were German 
submarines off the Dardanelles, and if the Turks were 
losing transports the English were losing battleships. 

219 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The situation held too many possibilities to make 
prophecy safe — I merely record the fact that on the 
afternoon of May 27 I stood on the plateau above 
Sedd ul Bahr, and perhaps five miles from it in an air 
line, and still found myself a regrettable distance from 
the Allies' front. 

The sun was shining level down the road as we re- 
turned to camp, and soldiers were still tramping peace- 
fully up to the front with their kettles of food. Mean- 
while the colonel had prepared a little exhibition for 
us. Six or eight soldiers stood in line, each with a 
dish and spoon, and in the dish a sample of the food for 
that night. We started at the top and tasted each: 
soup, mutton, stewed green beans, new-baked bread, 
stewed plums, and a particularly appetizing pilaf, made 
out of boiled whole wheat and raisins. Everything 
was good, and the beaming colonel declared that the 
first thing in war was to keep your soldiers well fed. 
We dined with him in his tent: soup and several meat 
courses, and cherry compote, and at the end various 
kinds of nuts, including the cracked hazelnuts, com- 
moner in Turkey than bananas and peanuts at home. 
He hoped to come to America some day, and thought 
we must soon develop the military strength to back 
our desires for peace, unless there were to be continual 
wars. New York's climate, the cost of fruit in Ger- 
many, and other peaceful subjects were touched on, 
and the colonel said that it was an honor to have us 
with him — ours we brilliantly responded — and a pleas- 
ant change from the constant talk and thought of war. 

220 



SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

He had been six years in the field now, what with the 
Italian and Balkan campaigns, and that was a good 
deal of war at a stretch. 

After excusing ourselves, though the amiable Turk 
said that he was in no hurry, we were led to a sort of 
tent de luxe, lined in scarlet with snaky decorations in 
white, and when the young aid discovered that we had 
brought no beds with us, he sent out and in a moment 
had not only cots and blankets, but mattresses and 
sheets and pillows and pillow-cases. He asked if we 
had fathers and mothers alive at home, and brothers 
and sisters, and if we, too, had been soldiers. It sur- 
prised and puzzled him that we had not, and that our 
army was so small. He was only twenty-two and a 
lieutenant, and he had a brother and father also in the 
army. With a great air of mystery he had his orderly 
dig a bottle of cognac out from his camp chest, and 
after we had drunk each other's health, he gave us his 
card with his name in Turkish and French. He brought 
a table and put on it a night candle[in a saucer of water, 
a carafe of drinking water, and gave me a pair of slip- 
pers — in short, he did for us in that brush-covered 
camp in the Gallipoli hills everything that could be 
done for a guest in one's own house. 

You can scarcely know what this meant without hav- 
ing known the difficulties of mere existence once you 
left Constantinople and got into the war zone, and 
Colonel Shukri Bey and Lieutenant Ahmed Akif will be 
remembered by at least two Americans when any one 
talks of the terrible Turk. 

221 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

I awoke shortly after daylight, thinking I heard an 
aeroplane strumming in the distance, and was drowsily 
wondering whether or not it was fancy, when a crash 
echoed up the valley. We both hurried out. It was 
sunup, a delicious morning, and far up against the 
southern sky the little speck was sailing back toward 
the west. There was a flash of silver just under the 
flier — it was an English biplane — and a moment later 
another crash farther away. Neither did any damage. 
A few minutes later we were looking at the remains 
of the bomb and propeller-like wings, whose whirling, 
as it falls, opens a valve that permits it to explode on 
striking its mark. Until it had fallen a certain num- 
ber of metres, we were told, mere striking the ground 
would not explode it — a device to protect the airman 
in case of accident to his machine or if he is forced 
to make a quick landing. In the fresh, still morning, 
with the camp just waking up and the curious Turkish 
currycombs clinking away over by the tethered horses, 
our aerial visitor added only a pleasant excitement to 
this life in the open, and we went on with our dress- 
ing with great satisfaction, little dreaming how soon 
we were to look at one of those little flying specks 
quite differently. 

We breakfasted with the colonel in his arbor on bread 
and ripe olives and tea, and walked with him round the 
camp, through a hospital and into an old farmhouse 
yard, where the gunsmiths were going over stacks of 
captured guns and the damaged rifles of the wounded, 
while the bees left behind in some clumsy old box hives 

222 



SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

buzzed away as of yore. Wiser than men, the colonel 
observed. There were English Enfields and French 
rifles of the early nineties, and a mitrailleuse to which 
the Turks had fitted a new wooden base. There were 
rifles with smashed barrels, with stocks bored through 
by bullets, clean-cut holes that must have gone on 
through the men who held them — live men like our- 
selves; quick choking instants of terror the ghosts of 
which we were poking and peering into there in the 
warm sunshine ! . . . 

We said good-by to the colonel, for our passes took 
us but to the valley, and he had stretched a point in 
sending us down the plateau the evening before, and 
bumped back to Kilid Bahr. We did not want to 
leave this part of the world without a sight of Troy, 
and as we had duly presented ourselves in Gallipoli, 
and were now by way of coming from it rather than 
Constantinople, and the Turkish official to whom the 
orderly took us wrote, without question, a permission 
to cross to Chanak Kale, we sailed with no misgivings. 

Alas for Troy and looking down on a modern battle 
from the heights of Ilium ! A truculent major of gen- 
darmes hurried us from the Asiatic shore as if we had 
come to capture it. We might not land, we might not 
write a note to the commandant to see if the permis- 
sion to stop in Chanak, for which we had wired to 
Constantinople the day before, had arrived; we might 
not telephone — we must go back to Europe, and write 
or telephone from there. 

So back to Europe, and after consultation and tele- 

223 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

phoning, back to Asia again, and this time we succeeded 
in effecting a landing and an audience with the com- 
mander of the defenses of the Dardanelles, Djevad 
Pasha. He was sitting under a tree in a garden look- 
ing out over the sea gate, which, with the aid of his 
two German colleagues, Ousedom Pasha and Merten 
Pasha, it was his task to keep shut — a trim Young 
Turk, more polished and "European" than the major 
of gendarmes, but no less firm. An American's wish 
to see the Troy he might never be so near again bored 
him excessively. We could not stay — we might not 
even spend the night. There was a boat that evening, 
and on it we must go. 

Gendarmes guarded us while we waited — we who 
the night before had slept in a scarlet-lined tent! — 
and gendarmes hung at our heels as we and three 
patient hamals with the baggage tramped ignomini- 
ously through Chanak Kale's ruined streets. The 
boat we went by was the same little side-wheeler we 
had come down on, crowded with wounded now, mud- 
stained, blood-stained, just as they had come from 
the trenches across the water, with no place to lie but 
the bare deck. The stifling hold was packed with 
them; they curled up about the engine-room gratings 
— for it was cold that night — yet there was no com- 
plaint. A tired sigh now and then, a moan of weari- 
ness, and the soldier wrapped his army overcoat a little 
closer about him, curled up like a dog on a door-mat, 
and left the rest to fate. A big, round, yellow moon 
climbed up out of Asia and poured its silver down on 

224 



SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

them and on the black hills and water, still as some 
inland lake. 

The side-wheeler tied up at Ak-Bash for the night, 
and it was not until the middle of the next morning 
that it was decided that she should cross and leave 
her wounded at Lapsaki instead of going on up to Con- 
stantinople. We lugged our baggage off and hunted 
up our old friend, the Hamburg-American captain, to 
see what might be done till some other craft appeared. 
He finally put us aboard a sort of enlarged tug which 
might be going up that afternoon or evening. 

It was about midday. The sun blazing down on the 
crowded flat; on boxes, sacks, stevedores wrapped up 
in all the variegated rags of the East shuffling in and 
out of the ships; on gangs digging, piling lumber, boil- 
ing water, cooking soup ; on officers in brown uniforms 
and brown lamb's-wool caps; on horses, ox-teams, 
and a vast herd of sheep, which had just poured out 
of a transport and spread over the plain, when from the 
hill came two shots of warning. An enemy aeroplane 
was coming! 

The gangs scattered like water-bugs when a stone 
is thrown into the water. They ran for the hill, 
dropped into trenches; to the beach and threw them- 
selves flat on the sand; into the water — all, as they 
ran, looking up over their shoulders to where, far over- 
head, whirred steadily nearer that tiny, terrible hawk. 

A hidden battery roared and — pop! — a little puff of 
cotton floated in the sky under the approaching flier. 
Another and another — all the nervous little batteries 

225 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

in the hills round about were coming to our rescue. 
The bird-man, safely above them, drew on without 
flinching. We had looked up at aeroplanes many 
times before and watched the pretty chase of the 
shrapnel, and we leaned out from under the awning 
to keep the thing in view. "Look," I said to Suydam; 
"she's coming right over us !" And then, all at once, 
there was a crash, a concussion that hit the ear like 
a blow, a geyser of smoke and dust and stones out on 
the flat in front of us, Through the smoke I saw a 
horse with its pack undone and flopping under its 
belly, trotting round with the wild aimlessness of 
horses in the bull-ring after they have been gored. 
Men were running, and, in a tangle of wagons, half a 
dozen oxen, on the ground, were giving a few spas- 
modic kicks. 

Men streaked up from the engine-room and across 
the wharf — after all, the wharf would be the thing he'd 
try for — and I found myself out on the flat with them 
just as there came another crash, but this time over 
by the Barbarossa across the bay. Black smoke was 
pouring from the Turkish cruiser as she got under 
way, and, with the shrapnel puffs chasing hopelessly 
after, the flier swung to the southward and out of 
sight. 

Officers were galloping about yelling orders; over 
in the dust where the bomb had struck, a man was 
sawing furiously away at the throats of the oxen 
(there were seven of them, and there would be plenty 
of beef in camp that night at any rate) ; there was a 

226 



SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

dead horse, two badly wounded men and a hundred 
feet away a man lying on his face, hatless, just as he 
had been blown there: dead, or as good as dead. 

It appeared that two fliers had come from opposite 
directions and most of the crowd had seen but the one, 
while the other dropped the bomb. It had struck 
just outside the busiest part of the camp, aimed very 
likely at the stores piled there. It had made a hole 
only five or six feet wide and two or three feet deep, 
but it had blown everything in the neighborhood out 
from it, as the captain had said. Holes you could put 
your fist in were torn in the flanks of the oxen by flying 
stones and chunks of metal, and the tires of some of 
the wagons, sixty or seventy feet away, had been cut 
through like wax. 

The ground was cleared, the men returned to work, 
and we even went in swimming, but at every un- 
expected noise one looked upward, and when about 
five o'clock the crowd scattered again, I will confess 
that I watched that little speck buzzing nearer, on a 
line that would bring him straight overhead, with an 
interest considerably less casual than any I had be- 
stowed on these birds before. There we were, con- 
fined in our little amphitheatre; there was that dia- 
bolical bird peering down at us, and in another 
minute, somewhere in that space, would come that 
earth-shaking explosion — a mingling of crash and 
whoujj ! There was no escaping it, no dodging it, 
nothing to get under but empty air. 

I had decided that the beach, about a hundred yards 

227 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

away from the wharfs, was the safest place and hur- 
ried there; but the speck overhead, as if anticipating 
me, seemed to be aiming for the precise spot. It is 
difficult under such circumstances to sit tight, reason- 
ing calmly that, after all, the chances of the bomb's 
not landing exactly there are a good many to one — 
you demand at least the ostrich-like satisfaction of 
having something overhead. So I scurried over to the 
left to get out from under what seemed his line of 
flight, when what should he do but begin to turn! 
This was really rubbing it in a bit. To fly across as 
he had that morning was one thing, but to pen one up 
in a nice little pocket in the hills, and then on a verti- 
cal radius of three or four thousand feet, to circle 
round over one's head — anything yet devised by the 
human nightmare was crude and immature to this. 

But was it overhead? If behind, and travelling at 
fifty or sixty miles an hour, the bomb would carry for- 
ward — just enough probably to bring it over; and if 
apparently over, still the bomb would have been sev- 
eral seconds in falling — it might be right on top of us 
now! Should we run backward or forward? Here 
was a place, in between some grain-bags. But the 
grain-bags were open toward the wharf, and the wharf 
was what he was aiming at, and a plank blown through 
you — No, the trench was the thing, but — Quick, 
he is overhead ! 

The beach, the bags, the ditch, all the way round 
the camp, and Suydam galloping after. Somewhere 
in the middle of it a hideous whiffling wail came down 

228 



SOGHAN-DERE AND AK-BASH 

the sky: Trrou . . . trrou . . . trou! — and then a 
crash ! The bomb had hit the water just off the end 
of the pier. I kept on running. There was another 
Trrou . . . trrou! another geyser of water, and the 
bird had flown on. 

I was on the edge of the camp by this time and that 
strange afternoon ended, when one of a gang of ditch- 
diggers, swathed in bright-colored rags, addressed me 
in English, a Greek-Turk from the island of Marmora, 
who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his 
gang had been hiding, announced that he had lived in 
New York for five years, in Fortieth Street, and worked 
for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get him out 
of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, 
somewhere on board ship. There were crowds like 
him — Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not wanted as soldiers 
but impressed for this sort of work. They were un- 
loading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our 
boat at last got under way. We paused till sunup at 
Lapsaki, crept close to shore through the Marmora, 
and once through floating wreckage — boards and a 
galvanized-iron gasolene tank — apparently from some 
transport sunk by a submarine, and after dark, with 
lights out as we had started, round the corner of 
Stamboul. 



229 



XIII 

A WAR CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

The press department of the Foreign Office in Vienna 
duly presented the application to the press bureau of 
the Ministry of War; the latter conveyed it to the 
"Kaiserliehe und Konigliche Armee-Oberkommando 
Kriegs-Presse-Quartier," a day's railroad journey nearer 
the front; the commandant made his recommendation 
to the chief of the General Staff. The permission it- 
self percolated back to Vienna presently, and early 
next morning I took the Teschen express. 

It was one of those semimilitary trains which run 
into this region behind the front — officers and couriers, 
civilians with military passes, just before we started a 
young officer and his orderly saying good-by to their 
wives. He was one of those amiable, blue-eyed young 
Austrians who seem a sort of cross between German 
and French, and the orderly was much such another 
man, only less neatly made and sensitive, and there 
were the same differences in their wives and their 
good-bys. 

The orderly saluted his officer, turned, clicked his 
heels, and saluted his officer's lady before he embraced 
his solid wife. The latter, rather proud to be in such 
company, beamed like a stove as the two men looked 

230 



A CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

down from the car steps, but the girlish wife of the 
captain bit her lips, looked nervously from side to side, 
winked faster and faster until the tears began to roll 
down her cheeks. Then the train started, the orderly 
waving his hand, but the young officer, leaning quickly 
forward, drew his wife toward him and kissed her on 
one of the wet eyelids. 

We crossed into Hungary, rolled northeastward for 
five or six hours into the Vag valley, with its green hills 
and vineyards and ruined castles, and finally came to 
a little place consisting almost entirely of consonants, 
in the Tatra foot-hills. Two blond soldiers in blue- 
gray saluted, took my luggage, showed me to a carriage, 
and drove to a village about a mile away — a little 
white village with a factoiy chimney for the new days, 
a dingy chateau for the old, and a brook running di- 
agonally across the square, with geese quacking in it 
and women pounding clothes. 

It was mid-afternoon, yet lunch had been kept wait- 
ing, and the officer who received me said he was sorry 
I had bothered to eat on the train. He told me where 
lodgings had been made ready, and that an orderly 
would take me there and look after my personal needs. 
They dined at eight, and at five, if I felt like it, I would 
probably find some of them in the coffee-house by the 
chateau. Meanwhile the first thing to do was to take 
one's cholera vaccination — for no one could go to the 
Galician front without being geimpft — and just as soon 
as I could take the second, a week later, we should 
start for the Russian front. 

231 






ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

In this fashion were strangers welcomed to the 
"Presse-Quartier," or rather to that part of it — this 
little Hungarian village — in which correspondents lived 
during the intervals of their trips to the front. The 
Austrians have pleasant manners. Their court is, next 
to that of Spain, the most formal in Europe, and ordi- 
nary life still retains many of the older courtesies. 
Every time I came into my hotel in Vienna the two 
little boys at the door jumped up and extended their 
caps at arm's length; an assistant porter, farther in, 
did the same; the head porter behind the desk often 
followed, and occasionally all four executed the ma- 
noeuvre at once, so that it was like a musical comedy 
but for the music. 

The ordinary salutation in Vienna, as common as 
our " hello !" is "I have the honor" (Ich habe die 
Ehrel). In Hungary — of course one mustn't tell a 
Hungarian that he is " Austrian" — people tell you that 
they are your humble servants before they say good 
morning, and those who really are humble servants 
not only say "Kiss the hands," but every now and 
then do it. It was natural, therefore, perhaps, that 
the Austro-Hungarians should treat war correspondents 
— often, in these days, supposed to be extinct — not 
only seriously but with a certain air. They had not 
only the air but indeed a more elaborate organization 
than any of the other belligerents. 

At the beginning of the war England permitted no 
correspondents at all at the front. France was less rigid, 
yet it was months before groups of observers began to 

232 






A CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

be taken to the trenches. Germany took correspon- 
dents to the front from the first, but these excursions 
came at irregular intervals, and admission to them in- 
volved a good deal of competitive wire-pulling between 
the correspondents themselves. The Austro-Hunga- 
rians, on the other hand, prepared from the first for 
a large number of civilian observers, including news 
and special writers, photographers, illustrators, and 
painters, and, to handle them satisfactorily, organized 
a special department of the army, this Presse-Quartier, 
once admitted to which — the fakirs and fly-by-nights 
were supposed to be weeded out by the preliminary 
red tape — they were assumed to be serious workmen 
and treated as the army's guests. 

The Presse-Quartier was divided into two sections: 
an executive section, with a commandant responsible 
for the arrangement of trips to the various fronts, and 
the general business of censorship and publicity; and 
an entertainment section, so to speak, also with its 
commandant, whose business it was to board, lodge, 
and otherwise look after correspondents when they 
were not on trips to the front. At the time I visited 
the Presse-Quartier, the executive section was in 
Teschen; the correspondents lived in Nagybiesce, two 
or three hours' railroad journey away. 

It was to this village — the most novel part of the 
scheme — that I had come that afternoon, and here 
some thirty or forty correspondents were living, writing 
past adventures, setting forth on new ones, or merely 
inviting their souls for the moment under a regime 

233 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

which combined the functions of tourists' bureau, rest- 
cure, and a sort of military club. 

For the time being they were part of the army — 
fed, lodged, and transported at the army's expense, 
and unable to leave without formal military permis- 
sion. They were supposed to "enlist for the whole 
war," so to speak, and most of the Austro-Hungarian 
and German correspondents had so remained — some 
had even written books there — but observers from neu- 
tral countries were permitted to leave when they felt 
they had seen enough. 

Isolated thus in the country, the only mail the mili- 
tary field post, the only telegrams those that passed 
the military censor, correspondents were as "safe" as 
in Siberia. They, on the other hand, had the advan- 
tage of an established position, of living inexpensively 
in pleasant surroundings, where their relations with 
the censor and the army were less those of policemen 
and of suspicious character than of host and guest. 
To be welcomed here, after the usual fretful dangling 
and wire-pulling in War Office anterooms and city 
hotels — with hills and ruined castles to walk to, a 
brook rippling under one's bedroom window, and all 
the time in the world — seemed idyllic enough. 

We were quartered in private houses, and as there 
was one man to a family generally, he was put in the 
villager's room of honor, with a tall porcelain stove in 
the corner, a feather bed under him, and another on 
top. Each man had a soldier servant who looked 
after boots and luggage, kept him supplied with cigars 

234 



A CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

and cigarettes from the Quartier commissariat — for a 
paternal government included even tobacco ! — and 
charmed the simple republican heart by whacking his 
heels together whenever spoken to and flinging back 
"Jawohl!" 

We breakfasted separately, whenever we felt like it, 
on the rolls with the glass of whipped cream and coffee 
usual in this part of the world; lunched and dined — 
officers and correspondents — together. There were 
soldier waiters who with military precision told how 
many pieces one might take, and on every table big 
carafes of Hungarian white wine, drunk generally in- 
stead of water. For beer one paid extra. 

The commandant and his staff, including a doctor, 
and the officer guides not on excursions at the moment, 
sat at the head of the long U-shaped table. Any one 
who came in or went out after the commandant was 
seated was supposed to advance a bit into this "U," 
catch his eye, bow, and receive his returning nod. The 
silver click of spurs, of course, accompanied this salute 
when an officer left the room, and the Austro-Hun- 
garian and German correspondents generally snapped 
their heels together in semimilitary fashion. All our 
goings and comings, indeed, were accompanied by a 
good deal of manner. People who had seen each other 
at breakfast shook hands formally half an hour later 
in the village square, and one bowed and was bowed to 
and heard the singsong . . . '"habe die Ehre!" a 
dozen times a day. 

Nagybiesce is in northern Hungary, and the peas- 

235 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

ants round about were Slovaks — sturdy, solid, blond 
people with legs the same size all the way down. 
Many of them still reaped with scythes and thrashed on 
the barn floor with old-fashioned flails, and one after- 
noon there was a curious plaintive singing under my 
window — a party of harvesters, oldish men and brown, 
barefooted peasant girls, who had finished their work 
on a neighboring farm, and were crossing our village 
on their way to their own. 

Their scythe blades were unslung and bound to the 
shafts with flowers and twisted straw; the girls had 
flowers in their hair and the men flowers in their hats. 
With their strange peasant detachment, they drifted, 
singing, past our patronizing villagers, scarcely looking 
to right or left, wild and wistful as wood animals or 
birds. I followed them for half a mile out between 
the fields. They scarcely spoke, but now and then 
handed about a jug of some peasant elixir, and all the 
time sent back that plaintive chant, which would die 
away, then swell out again as some new singer took 
up the refrain. 

As one watched them disappear or saw others like 
them working in the fields — their red embroidered caps 
like poppies in the wheat — one thought of what the 
term "Slovak" is generally associated with at home 
— of mines and slaughter-houses and inside tenements 
and the greed and sordidness that are so often their 
only glimpse of the new world. That the kind of liv- 
ing such immigrants will submit to is as bad for us 
as it is for them, and that immigration should be re- 

236 



A CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

stricted, one may readily admit, yet they must smile 
a little bitterly if they ever hear the talk of the " dung- 
hills of Europe' ' and think of the life they have left 
behind. 

The Quartier naturally stirred things up a good deal 
in Nagybiesce. There was one week when we could 
not go into the street without being surrounded by 
little girls with pencils and cards asking for our " auto- 
gram. " The candy shop kept by two girl wives whose 
husbands were at the front did a vast business, and the 
young women had somebody to talk to all day long. 
The evening the news came that Warsaw had fallen, 
candles were lighted in all the windows on the square, 
and the band with the villagers behind it came to ser- 
enade us as we were at dinner. The commandant 
bowed from the window, but a young Hungarian jour- 
nalist leaned out and without a moment's hesitation 
poured forth a torrent for fully fifteen minutes with 
scarce a pause for breath. I told him that such im- 
promptu oratory seemed marvellous, but he dismissed 
it as nothing. "I'm politiker!" he explained, with a 
wave of his hand. 

One day there was a cattle fair. To see one of these 
hard-headed old peasant women punch, poke, and 
otherwise examine a cow from teeth to tail as imper- 
sonally as she would look over some sort of churn was 
an experience in itself. Another day there was a 
wedding. People waited for an hour in the rain to 
see the carriage come from the church, and all that 
evening womenfolk loitered in the shadow across the 

237 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

street for a glimpse, through the shutters, of the wed- 
ding supper. The kitchen door was open, and they 
could see the dishes hastily washed to go on again, 
and listen while the bride, without accompaniment, 
lifted her voice in lugubrious song. 

The son of the family in whose house I lived was 
fighting on the Russian front, the father spent most 
of his time at an inn he kept in a neighboring village, 
and the house was looked after by a hard-fisted old 
Slovak mother and her daughter — a capable chip of 
the old block, with blond hair and rather chilly green 
eyes. 

They were well-to-do, as the villagers went, and 
owned a rented building down the street, but preferred 
to live frugally. They were up at daylight, and busy 
all day making dough pills with which to stuff their 
geese, tending bar, cooking for the absent husband, 
and now and then poking something into the pen 
where their pig lived his dismal and mysterious life — 
in darkness but for the light which squeezed through 
the crack at which he hopefully grunted when any one 
came near. 

The mother knew only Slovak, but the daughter 
spoke a little German as well as Hungarian, and with a 
handful of German words we gossiped at length. She 
had strong leanings toward the polite w T orld, but, like 
many village girls, was, beyond a certain point, more 
self-contained and circumspect than' the softer, subtler 
city type. She rarely joined in the evening promenade 
round the square — at least not after nine o'clock. It 

238 



i 






< r; 






* 




i*3~ H<U 






'"' . 




UMrei) STATES Of AMERICA 
VEMiA. AUSTRIA 









^ 






*m ia. 



The author's passport, issued in January, 1915, covered with vises. 
Each vise means a frontier crossed. The shorter section was 
an additional piece of paper pasted on to the original passport. 



A CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

was not done, she said, "by the best houses." And 
while she could talk to any well-behaved (anstandig) 
man, she "had no need" of these army officers, nor 
any of us. She once showed me an album full of pic- 
ture post-cards sent by various admirers — that was 
nothing, she said; she had plenty more. 

There were at least three eligible suitors for whom 
she had but to whistle. One kept a little Gasthaus in 
a near-by village and was much desired by her parents, 
but him she would never take. There was no life 
for a girl even in Nagybiesce; in the other place she 
was as good as dead — no theatre, no band, no place to 
go walking: nothing but w T ork. I made some sage 
comment to the effect that it might be better to live 
in a village with a man she was fond of than in a city 
with somebody else, to which Stefania shrugged her 
shoulders and averred that with agreeable surround- 
ings she thought she could like almost anybody. 

The second man was in the army, but serving as a 
station agent. He was good-looking and in a place 
that was almost a city, but — and this "but" was evi- 
dently the third man. As she spoke of him — the young 
drug-store man in Pressburg — her manner underwent 
a sudden and dazzling change. He came from a very 
elegant family, she said, and was himself very elegant, 
and she revealed a photograph of a swarthy youth in 
a soft hat and a short, wide tan coat, with big buttons. 

So elegant was he, so amiable, with such a city air — 
as she went on about him her German collapsed and 
finally even her Slovak. She could not talk at all, 

239 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

only glow and sparkle and nod her head with a curious 
bird-like motion, finishing with an odd, convulsive ges- 
ture which began somewhere in her shoulders and came 
out with a curious sort of sidewise kick. There was no 
doubt how Stefania felt about the Pressburg druggist. 

With amenities of this nature — walks and climbs, 
and even a little work — the Quartier guests passed 
their time while waiting their turn to go to the front. 
There were always, while I was there, one or more 
parties in the field, either on the Italian or the Russian 
front, or both, while a few writers and artists were 
well enough known to be permitted to go out alone. 
The Hungarian, Mr. Molnar, for instance, whose 
"Devil" was played in America a few years ago, was 
writing at that time a series of letters under the gen- 
eral title "Wanderings on the East Front/ ' and ap- 
parently, within obvious military limitations, he did 
wander. One day another man came into lunch with 
the news that he was off on the best trip he'd had yet 
— he was going back to Vienna for his skis, to go down 
into the Tyrol and work along the glaciers to the bat- 
tery positions. Another man, a Budapest painter, 
started off for an indefinite stay with an army corps 
in Bessarabia. He was to be, indeed, part of the army 
for the time being, and all his work belonged to the 
army first. As this is being written a number of paint- 
ers sent out on similar expeditions have been giving 
an exhibition in Vienna — portraits and pencil sketches 
much like those Frederic Remington used to make. 

Foreigners not intending to remain in Austria- 

240 



A CORRESPONDENTS' VILLAGE 

Hungary could not expect such privileges, naturally; 
but if they were admitted to the Quartier at all they 
were sent on the ordinary group excursions like the 
home correspondents themselves. Indeed, the won- 
der was — in view of the comparative ease with which 
neutral correspondents drifted about Europe: the 
naivete^ to put it mildly, with which the wildest ro- 
mances had been printed in American newspapers, 
that we were permitted to see as much as we did. 

When a group started for the front, it left Nagy- 
biesce in its own car, which, except when the itinerary 
included some large city — Lemberg, for instance — 
served as a little hotel until they came back again. 
The car was a clean, second-class coach, of the usual 
European compartment kind, two men to a compart- 
ment, and at night they bunked on the long transverse 
seats comfortably enough. We took one long trip of 
a thousand miles or so in this way, taking our own 
motor, on a separate flat car, and even an orderly 
servant for each man. Each of these groups was, of 
course, accompanied by an officer guide — several were 
detailed at the Quartier for this special duty — whose 
complex and nerve-racking task it was to answer all 
questions, make all arrangements, report to each local 
commandant, pass sentries, and comfortably waft his 
flock of civilians through the maze of barriers which 
cover every foot, so to speak, of the region near the 
front. 

The things correspondents were permitted to see 
differed from those seen on the other fronts less in 

241 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

kind than in quantity. More trips were made, but 
there is and can be little place for a civilian on a 
" front," any spot in which, over a strip several miles 
wide, from the heavy artillery positions of one side to 
the heavy artillery of the other, may be in absolute 
quiet one minute and the next the centre of fire. 
There is no time to bother with civilians during an 
offensive, and, if a retreat is likely, no commander 
wishes to have country described which may pres- 
ently be in the hands of the enemy. Hidden batteries 
in action, reserves moving up, wounded coming back, 
fliers, trenches quiet for the moment — this is about 
as close to actual fighting as the outsider, under ordi- 
nary circumstances, can expect to get on any front. 
The difference in Austria-Hungary was that corre- 
spondents saw these things, and the battle-fields and 
captured cities, not as mere outsiders, picked up from 
a hotel and presently to be dropped there again, but 
as, in a sense, a part of the army itself. They had 
their commandant to report to, their "camp" and 
"uniform" — the gold-and-black Presse-Quartier arm 
band — and when they had finished one excursion they 
returned to headquarters with the reasonable cer- 
tainty that in another ten days or so they would start 
out again. 



242 



XIV 

CANNON FODDER 

At the head of each iron bed hung the nurse's chart 
and a few words of "history." These histories had 
been taken down as the wounded came in, after their 
muddy uniforms had been removed, they had been 
bathed, and could sink, at last, into the blessed peace 
and cleanness of the hospital bed. And through them, 
as through the large end of a telescope, one looked 
across the hot summer and the Hungarian fields, now 
dusty and yellow, to the winter fighting and freezing 
in the Carpathians. 

"Possibly," the doctor said, "you would like to see 
one of these cases." The young fellow was scarce 
twenty, a strapping boy with fine teeth and intelligent 
eyes. He looked quite well; you could imagine him 
pitching hay or dancing the czardas, with his hands on 
his girl's waist and her hands on his, as these Hun- 
garian peasants dance, round and round, for hours 
together. But he would not dance again, as both his 
feet had been amputated at the ankle and it was from 
the stumps that the doctor was unwrapping the band- 
ages. The history read: 

While doing sentry duty on the mountains on March 28, we 
were left twenty-four hours without being relieved and during 
that time my feet were frozen. 

243 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The doctor spoke with professional briskness. He 
himself would not have tried to save any of the foot — 
better amputate at once at the line of demarcation, 
get a good flap of healthy tissue and make a proper 
stump. "That scar tissue'll never heal — it'll always 
be tender and break when he tries to use it; he has been 
here four months now, and you can see how tender 
it is." 

The boy scowled and grinned as the doctor touched 
the scar. For our English and those things under 
the sheet he seemed to have much the same feeling of 
strangeness: both were something foreign, rather un- 
comfortable. He looked relieved when the bandages 
were on again and the white sheet drawn up. 

"We had dozens of them during the winter — one 
hundred and sixty-three frozen feet and one hundred 
frozen hands in this hospital alone. They had to be 
driven back from the front in carts, for days some- 
times. When they got here their feet were black — 
literally rotting away. Nothing to do but let the flesh 
slough off and then amputate." 

We strolled on down the sunny, clean-smelling wards. 
The windows were open. They were playing tennis 
in the yard below; on a bench under a tree a young 
Hungarian soldier, one arm in a sling, and a girl were 
reading the same book. 

Sunday is a very genial day in Budapest. The cafe* 
tables are crowded, orchestras playing everywhere, 
and in dozens of pavilions and on the grass and gravel 
outside them peasants and the humbler sort of people 

244 



CANNON FODDER 

are dancing. The Danube — beautiful if not blue — 
flows through the town. 

Pest is on one bank and Buda on the other, beside 
a wooded hill climbing steeply up to the old citadel, 
somewhat as the west bank of the Hudson climbs up 
to Storm King. 

I first came on the Danube at Budapest in the evening 
after dinner and saw, close in front of me, what looked 
to be some curious electric-light sign. It seemed odd 
in war time, and I stared for a moment before I saw 
that this strange design was really the black, opposite 
bank with its zigzag streams of lamps. 

Few cities have so naturally beautiful a drop-curtain, 
and, instead of spoiling it with gas-works and grain- 
elevators as we should do, the Hungarians have been 
thoughtful enough to build a tree-covered promenade 
between the Danube and the string of hotels which 
line the river. In front of each of these hotels is a 
double row of tables and a hedge, and then the trees, 
under which, while the orchestras play, all Pest comes 
to stroll and take the air between coffee-time and the 
late Hungarian dinner. 

Hundreds of cities have some such promenade, but 
few so genial and cosey a one as that of Budapest — 
not the brittle gayety of some more sophisticated cap- 
itals, but the simpler light-heartedness of a people full 
of feeling, fond of music and talk, and ready to share 
all they have with a stranger. 

The bands play tunes from our musical comedies, 
but every now and then — and this is what the people 

245 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

like best — they swing into the strange, rolling, pas- 
sionate-melancholy music of the country. Wherever 
the tzigany music comes from, it seems Hungarian, 
at any rate — fiery and indolent and haphazard, rolling 
on without any particular rhyme or reason, now piling 
up and now sinking indolently back as the waves roll 
up and fall back on the sand. People will listen to it 
for hours, and you can imagine one of those simpler 
daredevils — a hussar, for instance — in his blue-braided 
jacket, red breeches, and big cavalry boots, listening 
and drinking, and thinking of the fights he has won 
and the girls he has lost, getting sorry for himself at 
last and breaking his glass and weeping, and being 
very happy indeed. 

There is a club in Budapest — at once a club and a 
luxurious villa almost too crowded with rugs and fine 
furniture. When you go to play tennis, instead of the 
ordinary locker-room one is ushered into a sort of 
boudoir filled with Chippendale furniture. It is a de- 
lightful place to get exercise, with tea served on a gar- 
den table between sets; yet, when I was in Budapest, 
the place was almost deserted. It was not, it seemed, 
the season that people came there, although just the 
season to use such a place. For six weeks they came 
here, and nothing could bring them back again. They 
did things only in spurts, so to speak: 

" They go off on hunting trips to the ends of the earth, 
bring back animals for the Zoo, then off to their coun- 
try places and — flop ! Then there is a racing season, 
and they play polo and race for a while, then — flop !" 

246 



CANNON FODDER 

I have never seen such interesting photographers' 
show-windows as there are in Budapest. Partly this 
is because the photographers are good, but partly 
it must lie in the Hungarians themselves — such vivid, 
interesting, unconventional faces. These people look 
as if they ought to do the acting and write the music 
and novels and plays and paint the pictures for all the 
rest of the world. If they haven't done so, it must be 
because, along with their natural talent, they have this 
indolence and tendency to flop and not push things 
through. 

It was this Budapest, so easy-going and cheerful, 
that came drifting through the hospital windows, with 
the faint sound of band music that Sunday afternoon. 

On all the- park benches and the paths winding up 
to the citadel, in a hundred shady corners and walks, 
soldiers, with canes and bandages, were sitting with 
their best girls, laughing with them, holding hands. 
The boys, with miniature flower-gardens in their 
hats, tinselled grass and red-white-and-green rosettes, 
could sit with their arms round their sweethearts as 
much as they wanted to, for everybody knew that they 
had just been called to the colors and this was their 
farewell. 

I looked over more of the histories — not in the ward, 
where one was, of course, more or less a nuisance, but 
in the room where they were filed in hundred lots. 
Some of the men were still in the hospital, some had 
died, most of them gone back to the front. There 
were many of these foot cases: 

247 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

"While on outpost duty in the Carpathians during a snow- 
storm I felt the lower part of my body becoming powerless. 
Not being able to walk, was carried back and put on train. 
Next day we were stopped, because Russians were ahead of us, 
and obliged to leave train. Waited two days without food or 
medical attention; then put on train for Budapest." 

"My regiment was in the Carpathians, and on or about 
January 20 my feet refused to obey. I held out for four days 
and then reported ill. Toes amputated, right foot." 

"I belong to German Grenadier Regiment No. . On 

February 6, while sleeping in open snow, I felt numbed in feet. 
Put on light duty, but on 8th reported ill and doctor declared 
feet frozen." 

"March 12, during heavy snowstorm, Russians attacked us. 
One of my comrades was shot in stomach, and I took off my 
gloves to bandage him. All at once our regiment sounded 
' Storm ! ' and I had to rush off to attack, forgetting my gloves. 
I had both my hands frozen." 

"I am field-cornet of the German Grenadiers. I was, 

since the beginning of the war, in Belgium and France, and at 
end of November sent to Russian Poland and January 1 to 
Carpathians. On February 6, while retiring to prevent the 
Russians surrounding us, I was shot in thigh at 1,500 yards dis- 
tance and fell. Within a few minutes I got two more shots." 

" That's just like a German," commented the nurse. 
" They always begin by telling just who they are and 
what they were doing. A Hungarian would probably 
just say that he was up in the mountains and it was 
cold. These soldiers are like big children, some of 
them, and they tell us things sometimes. . . ." 

" While in Carpathians on January 20 I reported to my lieu- 
tenant, feet frozen. He said dig a hole and when you are quite 

248 



CANNON FODDER 

frozen we will put you in. I stood it another seven days, then 
we had to retreat. I went myself to the doctor; my feet were 
then black already. Debreczen hospital six days, then here. 
Both amputated." 

The feet were gone, at any rate, whatever the lieu- 
tenant may have said. We returned to the German 
field-cornet. 

"He came in walking — a fine, tall man. We had 
only one place to bathe the men in, then: a big tank 
— for everything was improvised and there was no 
hot-water heater — and one of the doctors told him 
he could use his own bath up-stairs, but he said no, 
he'd stay with his men. He seemed to be getting on 
all right, then one morning the doctor touched his leg 
and he heard that crackling sound — it was gas infec- 
tion. They just slit his leg down from hip to knee, 
but it was no use — he died in three hours. Practically 
all the wounds were infected when the men came in, 
but suppose he could have picked up something in 
that bath? ... He came in walking." 

Through most of the German histories one could see 
the German armies turning now this way, now that, 
against their " world of enemies," as they say: 

"I belong to Regiment German Infantry and am sta- 
tioned since March 1 in Carpathians. I am in active service 
since the start, having done Belgium, France, and Russia." 

" While at battle of Luneville, with troop of about forty men 
stormed battery, capturing them, for which decorated with 
Iron Cross. Shifted to Carpathians. After march in severe 
cold, fingers and feet frozen." 

249 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

"While in France attacking I was hit in head by shrapnel. 
In hospital fourteen days, then sent to Carpathians on Decem- 
ber 7 with Austro-Hungarian troops. Wounded in arm and 
while creeping back hit five times in fifteen minutes. Lay all 
afternoon in trenches." 

" I think those are the three who came in together one night, 
all singing 'Die Wacht am Rhein'; they all had the Iron Cross. 
They were a noisy lot. They all got well and went back to the 
front again." 

Here were three pictures from the Galician fighting: 

"Wounded by shrapnel near Przemysl, bandaged by com- 
rade, and helped to house; only occupant old woman. Lay on 
straw two days, no food. Called to men passing; they had me 
moved in cart seventy miles to hospital. Stayed eight days; 
started on train, then taken off for three days, then to Budapest.' ' 

" During fighting at Lupkow Pass I was wounded by two pis- 
tol-shots. First one, fired by Russian officer, hit me in chest. 
Ran back to my company and in darkness taken by one of our 
officers for Russian and shot in arm." 

" While digging trenches struck by a rifle-bullet in two places. 
Lay in trench two hours when found by Russian infantrymen, 
who hurriedly dressed me and put me out of firing-range on 
horse blanket in old trench. Later found by our soldiers, car- 
ried to base, and dressed there, then to field-hospital, then in 
cart to railroad station. Went few kilometres by train, but 
became so ill had to be taken off for two days, then sent to 
Budapest. Seventeen days. Two months in hospital; returned 
to front." 

"We called that man 'professor/" said the nurse. 
"He was a teacher of some sort. There was a boy 
here at the same time, a Pole, but he could speak 

250 



CANNON FODDER 

English: just out of the university — Cracow, I think. 
He was in Serbia, and was shot through the temple; 
he lost the sight of both eyes." 

Several in the Serbian fighting had struck river 
mines. One, who had been ordered to proceed across 
the River Save near Sabac, remarked that he was "told 
afterward" they had struck a floating mine and that 
seven were killed and thirteen wounded. 

The Serbian campaign was not pleasant. The Ser- 
bians do not hold up their hands, as the big, childlike 
Russians sometimes seem to have done. They fight 
as long as they can stand. Then there was disease 
and lack of medical supplies and service. 

"They came in covered with mud and with frac- 
tures done up with twigs — just as they had been 
dressed on the field. Sometimes a fractured hip would 
be bound with a good-sized limb from a tree reaching 
all the way from the man's feet to his waist." 

Yet the wonder is what nature and the tough con- 
stitutions of these young men will do with intelligent 
help. We came to what they call a "face case." 

"Wounded November 4 in Galicia by rifle-fire on right side 
of face and right hand; dressed by comrade, then lost conscious- 
ness until arrived here. ['He probably means/ explained the 
nurse, 'that he was delirious and didn't realize the time.'] Phys- 
ical examination — right side of face blown away; lower jaw 
broken into several pieces, extending to left side; teeth on lower 
jaw loose; part of upper jaw gone, and tongue exposed. In- 
fected. Operated — several pieces of lower jaw removed and two 
pieces wired together in front." 

251 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

From the desk drawer the nurse picked out several 
photographs — X-ray pictures of little round shrapnel 
bullets embedded in flesh, of bone splintered by rifle- 
bullets and shot through the surrounding flesh as if 
they had been exploded; one or two black feet cut off 
above the ankles; one of a group of convalescents 
standing on the hospital steps. 

"There he is," she said, pointing to a man with a 
slightly crooked jaw — the man whose history we had 
just read. "We saved it. It isn't such a bad face, 
after all." 

The worst wounds, of course, do not come to a hos- 
pital so far from the front as this — they never leave 
the battle-field at all. In Turkey, for instance, where 
travelling is difficult, very few of those shot through the 
trunk of the body ever got as far as Constantinople — 
nearly all of the patients were wounded in the head, 
arms, or legs. On over a thousand patients in this 
Budapest hospital the following statistics are based: 
Rifle wounds, 1,095; shrapnel, 138; shell, 2; bayonet, 
2; sabre, 1; hand-grenade, 1; frozen feet, 163; frozen 
hands, 100; rheumatism, 65; typhoid, 38; pneumonia, 
15; tetanus, 5; gas infection, 5. Deaths, 19 — sep- 
tsemia, 7; pneumonia, tetanus, typhoid, 1. 

It was dark when I started down-stairs, through that 
warm, brooding stillness of a hospital at night. The 
ward at the head of the stairs was hushed now, and 
the hall lamp, shining across the white trousers of an 
orderly dozing in his chair within the shadow of the 
door and past the screen drawn in front of it, dimly 

252 



CANNON FODDER 

lit the foot of the line of beds where the men lay sleep- 
ing. Nothing could happen to them now — until they 
were sound again and the order came to go out and 
fling themselves again under the wheels. The doctor 
on duty for the night, coat off, was stretched on his 
sofa peacefully reading under a green lamp. And, as 
I went down-stairs past the three long wards, the only 
sign of life was in a little circle of light cast by a single 
lamp over the bed of one of the new patients, lighting 
up the upturned profile of a man and the fair hair of 
the young night nurse bending over him and silently 
changing the cloths on his chest. 

We dined late that evening on an open balcony at 
the top of the house. People in Vienna and Budapest 
like to eat and drink in the open air. Below us lay 
the dark velvet of the park, with an occasional lamp, 
and beyond, over the roofs of Pest, the lights of Buda 
across the river. 

Up through the trees came the voices of men sing- 
ing. I asked what this might be. They were men, 
my friends explained, who had had their legs ampu- 
tated. There were fifty-eight of them, and the people 
who owned the big, empty garden across the street 
had set it aside for them to live in. There they could 
sit in the sun and learn to walk on their artificial legs 
— it was a sort of school for them. 

I went to see it next morning — this Garden of Leg- 
less Men. They were scattered about under the trees 
on benches two by two, some with bandaged stumps, 
some with crutches, some with no legs at all. They 

253 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

hobbled over willingly enough to have their pictures 
taken, although one of them muttered that he had 
had his taken seventy times and no one had sent him 
a copy yet. The matron gathered them about her, 
arranging them rather proudly so that their wounds 
would show. One looked to be quite all right — be- 
cause he had artificial legs, boots and all, below the 
knee. 

"Come," said the matron, "show the gentleman 
how you can walk." And the obedient man came 
wabbling toward us in a curious, slightly rickety prog- 
ress, like one of those toys which are wound up and 
set going on the sidewalk. At the matron's suggestion 
he even dropped one of his canes. He could almost 
stand alone, indeed, like some of the political argu- 
ments for which millions of healthy young fellows like 
him obediently go out to fight. 

The Augusta Barracken Hospital is on the out- 
skirts of Budapest — a characteristic product of the 
war, wholesale healing for wholesale maiming — 4,000 
beds and all the essentials, in what, two months before, 
was a vacant lot by the railroad tracks. 

The buildings are long, one-story, pine barracks, 
just wide enough for two row T s of beds with an aisle 
down the centre. The space between the barracks is 
filled, in thrifty European fashion, with vegetable-gar- 
dens, and they are set on neat streets through which 
the patients can be wheeled or carried to and from the 
operating and dressing rooms without going up or 

254 




— 

-r 



CANNON FODDER 

down stairs. Trains come in from the observation 
hospitals near the front, where all wounded now stay 
for five days until it is certain they have no contagious 
disease, and switch right up to the door of the receiv- 
ing-room. 

The men give their names, pass at once to another 
room where their uniforms are taken away to be dis- 
infected, thence to the bathroom, then into clean 
clothes and to bed. It is a city of the sick — of healing, 
rather — and on a bright day, with crowds of conva- 
lescents sitting about in their linen pajamas in the sun, 
stretcher-bearers going back and forth, the capable- 
looking surgeons with their strong, kind faces, pretty 
nurses in nunlike white, it all has the brisk, rather 
jolly air of any vigorous organism, going full blast 
ahead. 

We had been through it, seen the wards of 
strapping, handsome, childlike Russians, as carefully 
looked after by the Hungarians as if they were then- 
own, when our officer guide remarked that in an hour 
or two a transport of four hundred new wounded 
would be coming in. We waited in the receiving- 
room, where a young convalescent had been brought 
out on a stretcher to see his peasant family — a weather- 
beaten father, a mother with a kerchief over her head, 
two solemn, little, round-faced brothers with Tyrolean 
feathers in their caps. Benches were arranged for 
those able to sit up, clerks prepared three writing- 
desks, orderlies laid a row of stretchers side by side 
for fifty yards or so along the railroad track. 

255 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The transport was late, the sun going, and I went 
down to the other end of the yard to get a picture of 
some Russians I had seen two days before. We had 
walked through their ward then, and I remembered 
one very sick boy, to whom one of the nurses with us 
had given a flower she was wearing, and how he had 
smiled as he put it to his face with his gaunt, white 
hand. "It doesn't take long," she had said, ; 'when 
they get like that. They have so little vitality to go 
on, and some morning between two and five — " and 
sure enough his bed was empty now. 

A troop-train was rushing by, as I came back, cov- 
ered with green branches and flowers. They went by 
with a cheer — that cheer which sounds like a cheer 
sometimes, and sometimes, when two trains pass on 
adjoining tracks so fast that you only catch a blur of 
faces, like the windy shriek of lost souls. 

Then came a sound of band music, and down the 
road, outside the high wire fence, a little procession 
led by soldiers in gray-blue, playing Chopin's " Funeral 
March." Behind them came the hospital hearse, 
priests, and a weeping peasant family. The little pro- 
cession moved slowly behind the wailing trumpets — it 
was an honor given to all who died here, except the 
enemy — and must have seemed almost a sort of ex- 
travagance to the convalescents crowding up to the 
fence who had seen scores of their comrades buried in 
a common trench. Opposite us the drums rolled and 
the band began the Austrian national hymn. Then 
they stopped; the soldier escort fired their rifles in the 

256 



CANNON FODDER 

air. That ended the ceremony, and the hearse moved 
on alone. 

Then the convalescents drifted back toward us. 
Most of them would soon be ready for the front again, 
and many glad of it, if only to be men in a man's world 
again. One of the nurses spoke of some of the others 
she had known. One man slashed his hand with his 
knife in the hope of staying behind. Even the bravest 
must gather themselves together before the leap. Only 
those who have seen what modern guns can do know 
how much to fear them. 

"For a week or so after they come in lots of them 
are dazed; they just lie there scarcely stirring. All 
that part of it — the shock to their nerves — we see 
more of than the doctors do. When the word comes 
to go out again they have all the physical symptoms of 
intense nervous excitement, even nausea sometimes." 

The train came at last — two long sections of sleep- 
ing-cars. An officer stepped off, clicked his heels, and 
saluted, and the orderlies started unloading the men. 
Those who could walk at all were helped from the 
doors; the others — men with broken hips, legs in casts, 
and so on — were passed out of the windows on stretch- 
ers held over the orderlies' heads. In the receiving- 
ward they were set down in rows before the three 
tables, most of them clutching their papers as they 
came. Each man gave his name and regiment, and 
such particulars, and the address of some one of his 
family to whom notice could be sent. It was one 
clerk's duty to address a post-card telling his family 

257 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

of his condition and that he was in the hospital. 
These cards were already ruled off into columns 
in each of which the words "Lightly wounded," 
" Wounded," "Severely wounded," "HI," "Very ill" 
were printed in nine of the languages spoken in Austria- 
Hungary. The clerk merely had to put a cross on the 
proper word. Here, for instance, is the Lightly 
wounded column, in German, Hungarian, and the 
other dialects: "Leicht verwundet, Konnyen megse- 
besult, Lehce ranen, Lekko raniony, Lecko ranenki, 
Leggiermente feritOj Lako ranjen, Lahko ranjen, Usor 
ranit" 

A number were Russians — fine, big, clear-eyed fel- 
lows with whom these genuine "Huns" chatted and 
laughed as if they were their own men. On one 
stretcher came a very pale, round-faced, little boy 
about twelve, with stubbly blond hair clipped short 
and an enchanting smile. He had been carrying 
water for the soldiers, somebody said, when a piece of 
shrapnel took off one of his feet. Possibly he was one 
of those little adventurers who run away to war as 
boys used to run away to sea or the circus. He seemed 
entirely at home with these men, at any rate, and 
when one of the Hungarians brought him a big tin 
cup of coffee and a chunk of black bread, he wriggled 
himself half upright and went to work at it like a 
veteran. 

As soon as the men were registered they were hur- 
ried out of their uniforms and into the bathroom. At 
the door two nurses in white — so calm and clean and 

258 



CANNON FODDER 

strong that they must have seemed like goddesses, in 
that reek of steam and disinfectants and festering 
wounds — received them, asked each man how he was 
wounded, and quickly, as if he were a child, snipped 
off his bandages, unless the leg or arm were in a cast, 
and turned him over to the orderlies. Those who 
could walk used showers, the others were bathed on 
inclined slabs. Even the worst wounded scarcely made 
a sound, and those who could take care of themselves 
limped under the showers as if they had been hospital 
boarders before, and waited for, and even demanded, 
with a certain peremptoriness, their little bundle of 
belongings before they went on to the dressing-room. 
Discipline, possibly, though one could easily fancy 
that all this organized kindness and comfort suddenly 
enveloping them was enough to raise them for the 
moment above thoughts of pain. 

As they lifted the man on the dressing-table and 
loosened the pillow-like bandage under his drawn-up 
thigh, a thick, sickening odor spread through the room. 
As the last bit of gauze packing was drawn from the 
wound, the greenish pus followed and streamed into 
the pan. The jagged chunk of shell had hit him at 
the top of the thigh and ploughed down to the knee. 
The wound had become infected, and the connecting 
tissues had rotted away until the leg was now scarcely 
more than a bone and the two flaps of flesh. 

The civilian thinks of a wound, generally, as a com- 
paratively decent sort of hole, more or less the width 

259 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

of the bullet itself. There was nothing decent about 
this wound. It was such a slash as one might expect 
in a slaughtered ox. It had been slit farther to clean 
the infection, until you could have thrust your fist 
into it, and, as the surgeon worked, the leg, partly 
from weakness, partly from the man's nervousness, 
trembled like a leaf. 

First the gauze stuffed into the cavity had to be 
pulled out. The man, of an age that suggested that 
he might have left at home a peasant wife, slightly 
faded and weather-worn like himself, cringed and dug 
his nails into the under side of the table, but made 
no outcry. The surgeon squeezed the flesh above and 
about the wound, the quick-fingered young nurse 
flushed the cavity with an antiseptic wash, then clean, 
dry gauze was pushed into it and slowly pulled out 
again. 

The man — they had nicknamed him "Pop" — 
breathed faster. This panting went into a moan, 
which deepened into a hoarse cry, and then, as he lost 
hold of himself completely, he began a hideous sort of 
sharp yelping like a dog. 

This is a part of war that doctors and nurses see; 
not rarely and in one hospital, bat in all hospitals and 
every morning, when the long line of men — "'pus 
tanks' we called 'em last winter," muttered one of 
the young doctors — are brought in to be dressed. 
There was such a leg that day in the Barracken Hos- 
pital; the case described here was in the American 
Red Cross Hospital in Vienna. 

260 




Surgeons, nurses, and wounded Russian prisoner in the Kaiserin Augusta 
Barrack Hospital, Budapest. 




A convalescent Austro-Hungarian soldier at the Kaiserin Augusta Hospital, 
Budapest, receiving a visit from his parents and little brothers. 



CANNON FODDER 

Such individual suffering makes no right or wrong, 
of course. It is a part of war. Yet the more one sees 
of it and of this cannon fodder, the people on whom 
the burden of war really falls, how alike they all are 
in their courage, simplicity, patience, and long-suffer- 
ing, whether Hungarians or Russians, Belgians or 
Turks, the less simple is it to be convinced of the 
complete righteousness of any of the various general 
ideas in whose name these men are tortured. I sus- 
pect that only those can hate with entire satisfaction 
and success who stay quietly at home and read the 
papers. 

I remember riding down into Surrey from London 
one Sunday last August and reading an editorial on 
Louvain — so well written, so quivering with noble 
indignation that one's blood boiled, as they say, and 
one could scarcely wait to get off the train to begin 
the work .of revenge. Perhaps the most moving pas- 
sage in this editorial was about the smoking ruins 
of the Town Hall, which I later saw intact. I have 
thought occasionally since of that editorial and of the 
thousands of sedentary fire-eaters and hate-mongers 
like the writer of it — men who live forever in a cloud 
of words, bounce from one nervous reaction to another 
without ever touching the ground, and, rejoicing in 
their eloquence, go down from their comfortable break- 
fasts to their comfortable offices morning after morn- 
ing and demand slaughter, annihilation, heaven knows 
what not — men who could not endure for ten minutes 
that small part of war which any frail girl of a trained 

261 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

nurse endures hour after hour every morning as part 
of the day's work. 

If I had stayed in London and continued to read the 
lies of but one side, I should doubtless, by this time, 
be able to loathe and despise the enemy with an entire 
lack of doubt, discomfort, or intelligence. But hav- 
ing been in all the countries and read all the lies, the 
problem is less simple. 

How many people who talk or write about war 
would have the courage to face a minute, fractional 
part of the reality underlying war's inherited romance ? 
People speak with pleasant excitement of " flashing 
sabres" without the remotest thought of what flash- 
ing sabres do. A sabre does not stop in mid-air with 
its flashing, where a Meissonier or a Detaille would 
paint it — it goes right on through the cords and veins 
of a man's neck. Sabre wounds are not very common, 
but there was one in the Vienna hospital that morning 
— a V-shaped trench in which you could have laid 
four fingers flat, down through the hair and into the 
back of the man's neck, so close to the big blood-ves- 
sel that you could see it beat under its film of tissue — 
the only thing between him and death. I thought of 
it a day or two later when I was reading a book about 
the Austrian army officer's life, written by an English 
lady, and came across the phrase: "'Sharpen sabres!' 
was the joyful cry." 

Be joyful if you can, when you know what war is, 
and, knowing it, know also that it is the only way to 
do your necessary work. The absurd and disgusting 

262 



CANNON FODDER 

thing is the ignorance and cowardice of those who 
can slaughter an army corps every day for lunch, 
with words, and would not be able to make so trivial 
a start toward the "crushing" they are forever talk- 
ing about as to fire into another man's open eyes or 
jam a bayonet into a single man's stomach. Among 
the Utopian steps which one would most gladly sup- 
port would be an attempt to send the editors and 
politicians of all belligerent countries to serve a week 
in the enemy's hospitals. 



263 



XV 

EAST OF LEMBERG 

Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front 

We left Nagybiesce in the evening, climbed that night 
through the high Tatras, stopped in the morning at 
Kaschau long enough for coffee and a sight of the old 
cathedral, rolled on down through the country of rob- 
ber barons' castles and Tokay wine, and came at 
length, in the evening, to Munkacs and the foot of the 
high Carpathians. 

This was close to the southernmost point the Rus- 
sians touched when they came pouring down through 
the Carpathian passes, and one of the places in the 
long line where Germans and Austro-Hungarians joined 
forces in the spring to drive them back again. 

Munkacs is where the painter Munkacsy came from. 
It was down to Munkacs, through Silesia and the 
Tatras, that the troop-trains came in April while snow 
was still deep in the Carpathians. Now it was a feed- 
ing-station for fresh troops going up and wounded 
and prisoners coming down. 

The officers in charge had no notion we were com- 
ing, but no sooner heard we were strangers in Hun- 
gary than we must come in, not only to dinner, but 
to dine with them at their table. We had red-hot 

264 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

stuffed paprika pods, Liptauer cheese mixed salmon- 
pink with paprika, and these and other things washed 
down with beer and cataracts of hospitable talk. Some 
one whispering that a bit of cheese might come in 
handy in the breakfastless, cholera-infested country, 
into which we were going that night, they insisted we 
must take, not merely a slice, but a chunk as big as a 
small trunk. We looked at the soup-kitchen, where 
they could feed two thousand a day, and tasted the 
soup. We saw the dressing-station and a few wounded 
waiting there, and all on such a breeze of talk and 
eloquent explanation that you might have thought 
you had stepped back into a century when suspicion 
and worry and nerves were unknown. 

The Hungarians are like that — along with their 
indolence and romantic melancholy — lively and hos- 
pitable and credulous with strangers. Nearly all of 
them are good talkers and by sheer fervor and convic- 
tion can make almost any phrase resemble an idea 
and a real idea as good as a play. Hungarians are 
useful when trenches must be taken by storm, just as 
the sober Tyrolean mountaineers are better for sharp- 
shooting and slow resistance. 

One of the interesting things about the Austro- 
Hungarian army, as well, of course, as an inevitable 
weakness, is the variety of races and temperaments 
hidden under these blue-gray uniforms — Hungarians, 
Austrians, Croatians, Slovaks, Czecks. Things in uni- 
versal use, like post-cards and paper money, often have 
their words printed in nine languages, and an Austro- 

265 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

Hungarian officer may have to know three or four in 
order to give the necessary orders to his men. And 
his men cannot fight for the fatherland as the Ger- 
mans do; they must rally round a more or less abstract 
idea of nationality. And one of the surprises of the 
war, doubtless, to many people, has been that its 
strain, instead of disintegrating, appears to have beaten 
this loose mass together. 

At the table that evening was a middle-aged officer 
and his aid on their way to a new detail at the front. 
They were simple and soldier-like and, after the flash- 
ing bosoms of the sedentary hinterland, it was pleasant 
to see these men, who had been on active service since 
the beginning, without a single medal. The younger 
Hungarian was one of those slumbering daredevils who 
combine a compact, rugged shape — strong wrists, hair 
low on the forehead — with the soft voice and shy 
manners of a girl. He spoke a little German and 
English in the slow, almost plaintive Hungarian ca- 
dence, but all we could get out of him about the war 
was that it had made him so tired — so mude. He had 
gone to school in Zurich but could not tell our Swiss 
lieutenant the name of his teacher — he couldn't remem- 
ber anything, any more, he said, with his plaintive 
smile. He had a little factory in Budapest and had 
gone back on furlough to see that things were ship- 
shape, but it was no use, he couldn't tell them what 
to do when he got there. 

Common enough, our captain guide observed. He 
had been in the fighting along the San until invalided 

266 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

back to the Presse-Quartier, and there were times, then, 
he said, when for days it was hard for him to remember 
his own name. 

We climbed up into the mountains in the night and 
he had us up at daylight to look down from creaking, 
six-story timber bridges built by the Austro-Hungarian 
engineers to replace the steel railroad bridges blown up 
by the Russians. We passed a tunnel or two, a big 
stockade full of Russian prisoners milling round in 
their brown overcoats, and down from the pass into 
the village of Skole. Here we were to climb the 
near-by heights of Ostry, which the Hungarians of the 
Corps Hoffmann stormed in April when the snow was 
still on the ground, and " orientiren" ourselves a bit 
about this Carpathian fighting. 

I had looked back at it through the "histories" and 
the amputated feet and hands in the hospital at Buda- 
pest — now, in the muggy air of a late August morning 
we were to tramp over the ground itself. There were, 
in this party of rather leisurely reporters, a tall, wise, 
slow-smiling young Swede who had gone to sea at 
twelve and been captain of a destroyer before leaving 
the navy to manage a newspaper; a young Polish count, 
amiably interested in many sorts of learning and nearly 
all sorts of ladies — he had seen some of the Carpathian 
fighting as an officer in the Polish Legion; one of the 
Swiss citizen officers — one can hear him now whacking 
his heels together whenever he was presented, and 

fairly hissing " Oberleutnant W , aus Schweiz!" and 

a young Bulgarian professor, who spoke German and 

267 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

a little French, but, unlike so many of the Bulgarians 
of the older generation who were educated at Robert 
College, no English. The Bulgarians are intensely 
patriotic and there was nothing under sun, moon, or 
stars which this young man did not compare with 
what they had in Sofia. German tactics, Russian 
novels, sky-scrapers, music, steamships — no matter 
what — in a moment would come his "Bei uns in Sofia" 
— (With us in Sofia) and his characteristic febrile ges- 
ture, thumb and forefinger joined, other ringers ex- 
tended, pumping emphatically before his face. 

Then there was our captain guide from the regular 
army, a volunteer automobile officer, a soldier servant 
for each man — for the Austrians do such things in 
style — and even, on a separate flat car, our own motor. 

The Carpathians here are in the neighborhood of 
three thousand five hundred feet high — a tangle of 
pine-covered slopes as steep as a roof sometimes, and 
reminding one a bit of our Oregon Cascades on a 
much-reduced scale. You must imagine snow waist- 
deep, the heights furrowed with trenches, the frosty 
balsam stillness split with screaming shells and shrap- 
nel and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns; imagine your- 
self floundering upward with winter overcoat, blanket, 
pack, rifle, and cartridge-belt — any one who has snow- 
shoed in mountains in midwinter can fancy what 
fighting meant in a place like this. Men's feet and 
hands were frozen on sentry duty or merely while 
asleep — for the soldiers slept as a rule in the open, 
merely huddled in their blankets before a fire — the 

268 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

severely wounded simply dropped in the snow, and for 
most of them, no doubt, that was the end of it. 

Puffing and steaming in our rain-coats, we climbed 
the fifteen hundred feet or so to the top of the moun- 
tain, up which the Russians had built a sort of cork- 
screw series of trenches, twisting one behind the other. 
We reached one sky-line only to find another looking 
down at us. Barbed-wire entanglements and "Span- 
ish riders" crossed the slopes in front of them — if was 
the sort of place that looks to a civilian as if it could 
hold out forever. 

The difficulty in country like this is, of course, 
to escape flanking fire. You fortify yourself against 
attack from one direction only to be enfiladed by 
artillery from some ridge to right or left. That was 
what the Austrians and Germans did and, following 
their artillery with an infantry assault, captured one 
of the upper Russian trenches. From this it was only 
a matter of a few hours to clear out the others. 

Except for the visits of a few peasants the battle-field 
had scarcely been touched since the snow melted. The 
hillside was peppered with shell holes, the trenches 
littered with old hand-grenades, brown Russian over- 
coats, the rectangular metal cartridge-clip cases — 
about like biscuit tins — which the Russians leave 
everywhere, and some of the brush-covered shelters 
in which the Russians had lived, with their spoons and 
wet papers and here and there a cigarette box or a 
tube of tooth-paste, might have almost been lived in 
yesterday. 

269 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The valley all the way back to Skole was strung 
with the brush and timber shelters in which the Rus- 
sians had camped — the first of thousands of cut-up 
pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia. All 
the drab and dreary side of war was in that little 
mountain town — smashed houses; sidewalks, streets, 
and fences splashed with lime against cholera; stores 
closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs 
threatening spies and stating that any one found carry- 
ing explosives or building fires would be shot. I went 
into one fairly clean little cafe, where it seemed one 
might risk a cup of tea — you are not supposed to drink 
unboiled or unbottled water in such neighborhoods — 
and the dismal old Jew who kept the place told me 
that he had been there since the war began. He made 
a sour face when I said he must have seen a good deal. 
A lot he could see, he said, six months in a cellar 
"gesteckt." 

There was a certain amount of cholera all through 
eastern Galicia, especially among the peasants, not so 
well housed, often, as the soldiers, and not nearly so 
well fed and taken care of. Every one who went into 
Galicia had to be vaccinated for cholera, and in the 
army this had all but prevented it. In a whole divi- 
sion living in a cholera-infected neighborhood there 
would be only one or two cases, and sometimes none 
at all. The uncomfortable rumor of it was everywhere, 
however, and one was not supposed to eat raw fruit or 
vegetables, and in some places hand-shaking, even in 
an officers' mess, was prohibited. 

270 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

Russian prisoners were working about the station 
as they were all over eastern Austria-Hungary — big, 
blond, easy-going children, apparently quite content. 
Our Warsaw Pole talked with one of them, who seemed 
to mourn only the fact that he didn't have quite so 
big a ration of bread as he had had as a soldier. He 
had come from Siberia, where he had left a wife and 
three children — four, maybe, by this time, he said; 
some rascally Austrian might have made another 
one. 

Beyond Skole we left the mountains — looking back 
at that imposing wall on the horizon, one could fancy 
the Russians coming down from the north and think- 
ing, " There we shall stand!" — and rode northward 
through a pleasant, shallow, valley country, past Ru- 
thenian settlements with their three-domed churches 
and houses steep-roofed with heavy thatch. Some of 
these Ruthenians, following the Little Russians of the 
south, Gogol's country, were not enthusiastic when 
the Russians came through. Among others, the Rus- 
sian Government had made great propaganda, given 
money for churches and so on, so that the apparently 
guileless peasants occasionally revealed artillery posi- 
tions, the Austrians said, by driving their cattle past 
them or by smoke signals from cottage chimneys. 

We stopped for dinner at Strij, another of those 
drab, dusty, half-Jewish towns filled now with German 
and Austro-Hungarian soldiers, officers, proclamations, 
and all the machinery of a staff headquarters, and the 
next morning rolled into Lemberg. The Russians cap- 

271 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

tured it in the first week of the war ; held it through the 
winter, and then, after the Czar had, from a balcony 
in the town, formally annexed it to the empire for- 
ever and ay, in April, the Austro-Hungarians retook 
it again in June. There were smashed windows in the 
railroad station, but otherwise, to a stranger coming 
in for the first time, Lemberg seemed swinging 
along, a big modern city of some two hundred thou- 
sand people, almost as if nothing had happened. 

With an officer from General Bom-ErmohTs staff, 
and maps, we drove out to the outlying fortifications, 
where the real fighting had taken place. The con- 
crete gun positions, the permanent infantry protec- 
tions with loopholes in concrete, and all the trenches 
and barbed wire, looked certainly as if the Russians 
had intended to stay in Lemberg. The full explana- 
tion of why they did not must be left for the present. 
What happened at one fortified position, a few miles 
southwest of Lemberg, was plain enough. 

Here, in pleasant open farming country was a con- 
crete and earth fort, protected by elaborate trenches 
and entanglements, in front of which, for nearly a 
mile across the fields, was an open field of fire. In- 
fantry might have charged across that open space until 
the end of the war without getting any nearer, but 
the offensive did not, of course, try that. Over behind 
distant clumps of trees and a wooded ridge on the 
horizon they planted their heavy batteries. On a 
space perhaps three hundred yards long some sixty of 
these heavy guns concentrated their fire. The infan- 

272 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

try pushed up under its protection, the fort fell, and 
the garrison was captured with it. 

It is by such use of artillery that herds of prisoners 
are sometimes gathered in. Just before the charging 
infantry reaches the trench, the cataract of artillery 
fire, which has been pouring into it, is suddenly shifted 
back a few hundred yards, where it hangs like a cur- 
tain shutting off escape. The success of such tactics 
demands, of course, finished work from the artillery- 
men and perfect co-ordination between artillery and 
infantry. At lunch a few days later in Cracow, a 
young Austrian officer was telling me how they had 
once arranged that the artillery should fire twenty 
rounds, and on the twenty-first the infantry, without 
waiting for the usual bugle signal to storm, should 
charge the trenches. At the same instant the artillery- 
men were to move up their range a couple of hundred 
yards. The manoeuvre was successful and the Russians 
caught, huddled under cover, before they knew what 
had happened. 

Though Lemberg's cafes were gay enough and the 
old Jews in gaberdines, with the orthodox curl dangling 
before each ear, dozed peacefully on the park benches, 
still the Russians were only a few hours' motor drive 
to the eastward, and next morning we went out to see 
them. All of the countiy through which we drove was, 
in a way, the " front" — beginning with the staff head- 
quarters and going on up through wagon-trains, re- 
serves, horse camps, ammunition-stations, and so on, 
to the first-line trenches themselves. 

273 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

Sweeping up through this long front on a fine autumn 
morning is to see the veiy glitter and bloom of war. 
Wounds and suffering; burned towns, and broken lives 
— all that is forgotten in the splendid panorama — men 
and motors and fliers and guns, the cheerful smell of 
hay and coffee and horses, the clank of heavy trucks 
and the jangle of chains, all in beautiful harvest 
country; in the contagion of pushing on, shoulder to 
shoulder, and the devil take the hindmost, toward 
something vastly interesting up ahead. 

Every one is well and strong, and the least of them 
lifted up and glamoured over by the idea that unites 
them. All the pettinesses and smallness of every-day 
existence seem brushed aside, for no one is working for 
money or himself, and every man of them may be 
riding to his death. 

Flippant young city butterflies jump to their feet 
and gravely salute when their elders enter, the loutish 
peasant flings up his chin as if he would defy the uni- 
verse. What a strange and magic thing is this disci- 
pline or team-w r ork or whatever you choose to call it, 
by which some impudent waiter, for instance, who 
yesterday would have growled at his tips, will to-day 
fling his chin up and his hands to his sides and beam 
like a boy, merely because his captain, showing guests 
through the camp, deigns to peer into his mess-can 
and, slapping him affectionately on the cheek, ask him 
if the food is all right ! 

We whizzed into the village of Kamionka, on the 
upper Bug, across which the Russians had been driven 

274 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

only a few days before. Their trenches were just 
within the woods a scant mile away, and the smoke of 
their camp-fires curled up through the trees. Across 
the much-talked-of Bug, which resembles here a tide- 
water river split with swampy flats, were the trenches 
they had left. They trailed along the river bank, bent 
with it almost at a right angle, and the Austro-Hun- 
garian batteries had been so placed that a crisscross 
fire enfiladed each trench. From the attic observation 
station into which we climbed, the officers directing the 
attack could look down the line of one of the trenches 
and see their own shells ripping it to pieces. "It was 
a sight you could see once in a lifetime," said one of 
the young artillerymen, still strung up with the excite- 
ment of the fight — exactly what was said to me at 
Ari Burnu by a Turkish officer who had seen the 
Triumph go down. 

That attic was like a scene in some military melo- 
drama, with its tattered roof, its tripod binoculars 
peering at the enemy, the businesslike officers dusty 
and unshaven, the field-telegraph operator squatting in 
one corner, with a receiver strapped to his ear. We 
walked across the rafters to an adjoining room, where 
there were two or three chairs and an old sofa, had 
schnapps all round, and then went out to walk over 
the position. 

In front was the wabbly foot-bridge run across by 
the pioneers, and on the swampy flats the little heaps 
of sod thrown up by the first line as they pushed across 
— wading up to their necks part of the way — under fire. 

275 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

On the near bank the Aust re-Hungarian trenches had 
run between the tombs of an old Jewish burying- 
ground. and from the earth walls, here and there, pro- 
jected a bone or a crumbling skull. The Russian 
trenches on the other bank wound through a farmyard 
in the same impersonal way — pig-pens, orchard, chick- 
en-coops, all thought of merely as shelter. It was just 
to the left of a pig-pen that a Russian officer had held 
his machine gun until the last minute, pouring in a 
flank fire. "He did Ins work ! " was the young officer's 
comment. 

We lunched with a corps commander and dined with 
B genial old colonel and Ins staff, and between times 
motored through level farming country to a position to 
the northward on the Rata, a tributary of the Bug. 
Both sides were watching each other here from their 
sausage-shaped captive balloons, and a few aeroplanes 
were snooping about but at the moment all was quiet. 
The Austro-Hungarians had been waiting here for over 
a fortnight, and the artillerymen had polished up their 
battery positions as artillerymen like to do when they 
: time. Two were in a pasture, so neatly roofed 
over with sod that a birdman might fly over the place 
until the cows came home without knowing guns were 
there. Another, hidden just within the shadow of a 
pme forest, was as attractive as some rich man's 
mountain camp, the gun positions as snug as yacht 
cabins, the officer's lodges made of fresh, sweet-smelling 
pme logs, and in a little recess hi the trees a shrine had 
been built to St. Barbara, who looks out for artillery- 
men. 

276 




Where the Austro-Hungarians forced a passage of the Bu«: River at 
Kamionka. 

The Austro-Hunsrarian trench shown in the two upper pictures went straight through 
an old Jewish cemetery. The lower picture is of the Russian trench, through a 
farmyard on the opposite river bank. A foot-bridge— a mere line— may be seen at 
the left of the top picture: beyond it a heavier timber foot-bridge, both built under 
fire by the Austro-Hungarian engineers. 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

The infantry trenches along the river, cut in the 
clean sand and neatly timbered and loopholed, were 
like model trenches on some exposition ground. 
Through these loopholes one could see the Russian 
trenches, perhaps a mile away, and in between the 
peasant women, bright red and white splashes in the 
yellow wheat, were calmly going ahead with their 
harvest. All along the Galician front we saw peasants 
working thus and regarding this elaborate game of war 
very much apparently as busy farmers regard a drag- 
hunt or a party of city fishermen. At one point we 
had to come out in the open and cross a foot-bridge. 

"Please — Lieutenant/' one of the soldiers pro- 
tested as the officer with us stepped out, standing 
erect, "it is not safe I" The officer crouched and hur- 
ried across and so did we, but just before we did so, 
up out of the field where they had been mowing, 
straight through this gap, came a little company of 
barefooted peasant women with their bundles of glean- 
ings on their heads, and talking in that singsong 
monotone of theirs, as detached as so many birds, they 
went pat-patting across the bridge. If one of these 
women could but write her impressions of war ! 

They had done their part, these peasant women and 
old men and children. All over Galicia, round the 
burned villages, right through barbed-wire entangle- 
ments up to the very trenches, stretched the yellow 
wheat. Somehow they had ploughed and sowed and 
brought it to harvest, and now with scythes, with 
knives even, sometimes, they were getting it under 
cover. At home we know gleaners generally only in 

277 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

rather sentimental pictures; here we saw them day 
after day, barefooted women and children going over 
the stubble and picking up the forgotten wheat heads 
and arranging them in one hand as if they were a 
bouquet. There will be no wheat wasted this year. 

And with them everywhere were the Russian prison- 
ers, swinging scythes, binding grain, sometimes com- 
ing down the road, without even a guard, sprawled in 
the sun on a load of straw. It would be hard to find a 
place where war seemed more a vast theatricalism than 
in some of these Hungarian and Galician neighbor- 
hoods. There seemed to be no enmity whatever be- 
tween captors and prisoners. Everywhere the latter 
were making themselves useful in the fields, in road- 
making, about railroad yards, and several officers told 
me that it was surprising how many good artisans, 
carpenters, iron-workers, and so on, there were among 
them. The Russians got exactly the same food as the 
Hungarian soldiers, and were paid a few cents a day 
for their work. You would see men in the two uni- 
forms hobnobbing in the open freight-cars as the work- 
trains rolled up the line, and sometimes a score or so 
of husky Russians working in the wheat, guarded by 
some miniature, lone, landsturm man. Of all the 
various war victims I had seen, these struck me as the 
most lucky — they could not even, like the wounded, be 
sent back again. 

We drove back through the dark that night, and in 
the bright, waving circle of an automobile search- 
fight, with the cool breath from the pines in our faces, 

278 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

saw that long "front" roll back again. Now and then 
a soldier would step into the white circle and, holding 
up his arm, struggle between his awe of this snorting 
motor with its imperial double-eagle flag and its sharp- 
voiced officers muffled in gray coats — between his 
peasant's habit of taking off his hat and letting such 
people blow by, and his soldier's orders to stop every- 
thing that passed. He stopped us, nevertheless, and 
the pass was laboriously read in the light of his electric 
lamp before we went on again. 

In the dark and quiet all the countless joints and 
wheels of the vast organism were still mysteriously 
turning. Once, in a cloud of dust, we passed troops 
marching toward the front — tired faces, laughing faces 
— the shout "Man in the road !" and then the glimpse 
of a couple of Red Cross men kneeling by a soldier who 
had given out on the way; once, in the black pines, 
cows driven by two little frightened peasant children; 
once a long line of bearded Jews, bound, with packs on 
their backs, for what was left of their homes; a supply- 
train, a clanking battery, and now and then other 
motors like ours with shrouded gray figures, streaking 
by in a flashing mist of dust. 

Next day, swinging southward into another sector 
of the front, over beautiful rolling hills, rather like the 
Genesee Valley, we drummed up a hill and came out 
at the top in a village square. It had once been a 
white little village clinging to the skirts of an old 
chateau — the village of Swirz and Count Lavasan's 
chateau — and both were now black and tumbled walls. 

279 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

In the centre of the square people were singing — a 
strange little crowd and strange, mournful singing. 
We thought at first it was a funeral service, for the 
women were weeping as they sang, but as the auto- 
mobile swept up beside them, we saw that it was men 
the women were crowding round — live men, going 
away to war. 

They were men who had not been called out be- 
cause the Russians held the country, and by one of 
fate's ironies, now that the enemy had been beaten 
and driven home, they must go out and fight. At a 
little table by the side of the square sat the recruiting 
officer with his pen and ledger, and the village school- 
master, a grave, intelligent-looking young man, who 
must have held such a place in this half -feudal village 
as he would have done a hundred years ago, was doing 
his best to glamour over the very realistic loss of these 
wives and sweethearts with patriotism's romance. He 
sang and obediently they all wailed after him the old 
song of scattered Poland — Poland is not lost — 

" Yeszcze Polska nie Zginela 
PoJci my zygemy. . . " 

The song stopped, there was a word of command, 
and the little squad started away. The women clung 
to their men and cried aloud. The children hanging 
to their skirts began to wail, too. There was some- 
thing creepy and horrible, like the cries of tortured 
animals, in that uncontrolled crying there in the 
bright morning sunshine. The schoolmaster spoke to 

280 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

them bluntly, told them to go back to their homes and 
their work, and obedient, and a little quieter now, 
they drifted away, with aprons to their faces and 
their little children clinging to their skirts — back to 
their cottages and the winter ahead. 

This picture did not fit in very well with our rollick- 
ing military panorama, but we were soon over the hills, 
and half an hour later were breakfasting on pat6-de- 
foie-gras sandwiches and champagne, with a charming 
old corps commandant, at a round table set outdoors 
in a circle of trees that must have been planted for 
that very purpose. Cheered and stiffened by many 
bows and heel clickings and warming hospitality, we 
hurried off to an artillery position near the village of 
Olszanica. 

Just under the brow of a hill we were stopped and 
told that it was dangerous to go farther, and we skirted 
off to the right under cover, to the observation station 
itself. More little Swiss chalets, more hospitable offi- 
cers, and out in front, across a mile of open country, 
the Russian trenches. Through a periscope one could 
see Russians exercising their horses by riding them 
round the circle — as silent and remote and of another 
world as a picture on a biograph screen. 

"You see that clump of trees," said the young 
officer, "one of their batteries is just behind there. 
Those aren't real trees, they were put there by the 
Russians." I swung the glass to the left, picked up a 
company of men marching. "Hello, hello," he whis- 
pered, then after a moment's scrutiny: "No — they're 

281 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

our men/' After all, war isn't always so different 
from the old days, when men had a time for righting 
and a time for going in to powder their wigs ! 

The division commander, standing a little behind 
us, remarked: "We shall fire from the right-hand bat- 
tery over behind the hill and then from the left — the 
one you passed near the road." Then turning to an 
officer at the field telephone he said: "You may fire 
now." 

There was a moment's pause, from over the woods 
behind us came a " Whr-r-r ong /" and out over the 
sunny fields a shell went milling away to send back a 
faint report and show a puff of cotton above the trenches 
to the right. It was a bit short — the next fell better. 
Another nod, another ' 'Whr-r-r ong !" from somewhere 
behind us, and this time the cottony puff was just 
short of the clump of trees where the Russians had 
concealed their battery. I picked up the spot through 
the glass and — one might have known! — there was 
one of those eternal peasants calmly swinging his 
scythe about fifty yards short of the spot where the 
shrapnel had exploded. I could see him straighten up, 
glance at it, then go on with his mowing again. 

There was a certain elegance, a fine spaciousness 
about these artillerymen and their work which made 
one more content with war again. No huddling in 
muddy trenches here, waiting to be smashed by jagged 
chunks of iron — everything clean, aloof, scientific, 
exact, a matter of fine wires crossing on a periscope 
lens, of elevation, wind pressure, and so on, and every- 

282 






EAST OF LEMBERG 

thing in the wide outdoors, and done, so to say, with 
a magnificent gesture. 

People drive high-power motor-cars and ride strong 
horses because of the sense of power it gives them — 
how about standing on a hill, looking over miles of 
splendid country to where a huddle of ants and hobby- 
horse specks — say a battalion or two — are just crawl- 
ing around a hill or jammed on a narrow bridge, and 
then to scatter them, herd them, chase them from one 
horizon to another with a mere, "Mr. Jones, you may 
fire now," and a wave of the hand ! 

The division commander took us back a mile or so 
to his headquarters for lunch, the Russians slowly 
waking up and sending a few perfunctory shells after 
us as we went over the hill, and here was another 
genial party, with three "Hochs" for the guests at the 
end. Even out here in empty Galicia the soldiers got 
their beer. "We're not quite so temperate as the 
Russians," the general smiled. "A little alcohol — 
not too much — does 'em good." 

A young lieutenant who sat next me regaled me with 
his impression of things in general. The Russians had 
squandered ammunition, he said, in the early days of 
the war — they would fire twenty rounds or so at a 
single cavalryman or anything that showed itself. 
They were short now, but a supply would come evi- 
dently every now and then, for they would blaze 
away for a day or so, then there would be a lull again. 
They were short on officers, too, but not so much as 
you might think, because they kept their officers well 

283 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

back of the line, generally. Their artillery was better 
than the infantry, as a rule; the latter shot carelessly 
and generally too high. 

Both he and the officer at my left — a big, farmer-like 
commissary man — spoke most amiably of the Rus- 
sians. The latter told of one place where both sides 
had to get water out of the same well. And there was 
no trouble. "No," he said, in his deep voice, "they're 
not bose," using the same word "bad" one would 
apply to a naughty boy. They were a particularly 
chipper lot, these artillerymen, and when I told the 
young lieutenant, who had been assigned to speak 
French to me under the notion that I was more at 
home in that language, that I had stopped at Queens 
Hotel instead of the St. Antoine in Antwerp, and that 
the Belgian army had crossed the Scheldt, and the 
pontoon bridge had been blown up directly in front of 
the hotel, he said that he would "certainly engage 
rooms there for the next bombardment," as he waved 
good-by. 

We were presented, while in Lemberg, to General 
Bom-Ermolli, and lunched at the headquarters mess. 
We also met Major-General Bardolf, his chief of staff, 
and chief of staff of the assassinated Crown Prince. 
The latter described to us the campaign about Lem- 
berg, and it was interesting to hear the rasping accent 
he gave to a word like "Durchbrechung" for instance, 
as if he were a Prussian instead of an Austrian, and to 
observe the frankness with which he ascribed the dif- 
ference that had come over the spirit of the Austro- 

284 



EAST OF LEMBERG 

Hungarian army to the coming of Mackensen and the 
Germans. 

West of Lemberg the pleasant country lost its war- 
time air and in Przemysl the two or three lonely land- 
sturm men guarding the wrecked fortifications, twice 
taken and twice blown up by retreating armies, lit 
candles to take us through the smashed galleries, and 
accepted a few Hellers when we came out, with quite 
the bored air of professional museum guides. 

The town of Przemysl itself was untouched. The 
greater part of the visible damage to the forts, some 
distance outside the town, was done by the dynamite 
of the retreating army. In one place, however, we 
saw the crater of one of the 42-centimetre shells which 
have been talked about oftener than they have been 
used. The Austrian " thirty-point-fives " have done 
much of the smashing ascribed to the "forty-twos," 
and ordinary work, like that of bombarding a city or 
infantry trenches, by cannon of smaller caliber. A 
genuine forty-two had been dropped here, however, we 
were told, on a building used by the Russians to store 
ammunition, and the building had simply disappeared. 
There was nothing left but a crater sixty or seventy 
feet across and eighteen to twenty feet deep. 

We trailed westward, through Tarnow, where the 
great drive first broke through, and on to the pleasant 
old university city of Cracow on the frontier of the 
Poland of which it was once the capital, and to which 
it belonged until the partition of 1795. It was toward 
Cracow that the Russians were driving when they first 

285 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

started for Berlin, and they were but a stone's throw 
away most of the winter. We got to Cracow on the 
Emperor's birthday and saw a military mass on the 
great parade-ground with the commandant of the fort 
standing uncovered and alone facing the altar, behind 
him his staff, and perhaps a hundred yards behind 
them and stretching for a quarter of a mile down the 
field, the garrison. At the intervals in the mass the 
whole garrison fired salutes, the volleys going down the 
field, a battalion at a time, now and then reinforced 
by the cannon on Kosciusko Hill. 

Cracow is Polish in atmosphere and feeling, and even 
in the few hours we were there one heard a good deal 
of Polish hopes and ambitions. The independence 
which Russia was to grant must come now, it would 
appear, from some one else. The Poles want a king 
of their own, but apparently they preferred to be 
under the wing of Austria rather than of Germany. 
The Germans, who had laid rather a firm hand on 
the parts of Poland they had occupied, might not fall 
in with this notion and one could detect here one of 
those clouds, "no bigger than a man's hand," which 
dramatists put in the first act, and which often swell 
to interesting proportions before the final curtain goes 
down. 



286 



XVI 

IN THE DUST OF THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of 
the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping 
across eastern Europe like beaters across a prairie, 
was now before Brest-Litovsk. This was the apex of 
this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail- 
road centre as well as a fortress, and the last strongly 
fortified place on the direct road to Moscow. It 
seemed as if the Russians must make a stand here, and 
even though we were four or five days getting there, 
the heavy artillery was not yet up, and there might 
still be time. 

We wound through the green hills and under the 
ruined castles of northern Hungary in the afternoon, 
rolled slowly up across Silesia and into Russian Poland 
in the night, and came at noon to Radom, only sixty- 
five miles south of Warsaw. Hindenburg had been 
here in October, 1914, when he invaded Poland to 
draw off the Russians from Galicia, then the Russian 
offensive had rolled over the place. The Russians had 
held it all the winter; now they were a hundred and 
fifty miles eastward — beyond the Vistula and the Bug 
— "boog," not "bug," by the way — and just hanging 
to the edge of Poland. 

287 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

The war had scarcely touched Budapest and Vienna 
— scarcely touched the ordinary city surfaces, that is 
to say. In hotels and cafes, streets and parks, life 
flowed on almost as brightly as ever. Farther north, 
in the Hungarian towns and villages, life still went on 
as usual, but one felt the grip of war — you might not 
go there nor move about without a military pass. 
Beyond Radom, where now in the pleasant park the 
very literary Polish young people were strolling, read- 
ing as they walked, there was, so to speak, no ordinary 
life at all — only the desert of war and the curious, 
intense, and complicated life of those who made it. 

Our car was hitched to a long transport-train — for 
it would be another two days before the automobiles 
would come back for us from the front — and we rode 
into this deserted Polish country toward Ivangorod. 

It had all been fought over at least twice — railroad 
stations and farm buildings burned, bridges dynamited, 
telegraph-poles cut down. The stations now were 
mere board shelters for a commandant and a soldiers' 
lunch-room; the bridges, timber bridges flung across 
by the pioneers; and the sawed-off telegraph-poles, 
spliced between railroad rails to save cutting new ones, 
were stuck back into the ground like forks. The Rus- 
sians had a rather odd way of burning stations and 
leaving the rails, the important thing, intact, but here 
and there they had neatly destroyed them for miles by 
exploding a cartridge under the end of each. 

The country is level here — fields interspersed with 
dark pine forests, planted in the European fashion, to 

288 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

be grown and harvested like any other crop — parks of 
living telephone-posts, thick as the quills of a porcu- 
pine. And through these pines and across the fields 
were the eternal Russian trenches, carefully built, 
timber-lined, sometimes roofed and sodded over, with 
rifle holes under the eaves. Barbed-wire entangle- 
ments, seven rows deep sometimes, trailed in front of 
them, through timber, through the long grass and 
flowers of marsh-land, a wicked foggy band against 
the green as far as one could see. Along the Galician 
front and in the Carpathians I had seen mile after mile 
of such trenches, timber-work, wires, and Spanish riders 
left behind, good as new, until it began to seem as if 
war were a peculiarly absurd game, consisting princi- 
pally in chopping down good trees and digging ditches, 
and then going somewhere else. 

In front of Ivangorod great preparations had been 
made. There was no tow T n here, but the great fortress, 
with its citadel, barracks, machine-shops, gardens, 
church, and protecting forts, was almost a city in itself. 
It had a garrison of twenty thousand, and its gigantic 
concrete walls, covered over with earth and grass, its 
moat and barbed wire, looked formidable enough. It 
had no modern heavy artillery, however, and even if 
it had, artillery in a fixed, known spot is comparatively 
helpless against the mobile guns, screened by hills 
and timber, besiegers can bring against it. Elaborate 
earthworks had, therefore, been thrown up several 
miles to the west of the fortress, but these became 
useless when the enemy, crossing the Vistula to north 

289 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

and south, swung round to cut off the one way out — 
the railroad to Brest-Litovsk. 

The Russians might have shut themselves in and 
waited — not very long, probably — until the big "thirty- 
point-fives" smashed the fort to pieces. They chose 
to get out in time, blew up the railroad bridge across 
the Bug, burned the barracks, and, with enough dyna- 
mite to give a good imitation of an earthquake, tum- 
bled the walls and galleries of the fortress into mel- 
ancholy heaps of rock. 

It was dusk when we rolled into Ivangorod and into 
the thick of that vast and complicated labor which 
goes on in the rear of an advancing army — all that 
laborious building up which follows the retreating 
army's orgy of tearing down — bridge builders, an acre 
or two of transport horses, blacksmiths and iron- 
workers, a semipermanent bakery, the ovens, on 
wheels, like thrashing-machine engines, dropping sparks 
and sending out a sweet, warm, steamy smell of corn 
and wheat. It never stopped, this bakery, night or 
day, and the bread was piled up in a big tent near by 
like cord-wood. 

And here you could see the amount of trouble that 
can be made by blowing up a railroad bridge. First, 
of course, a new timber bridge has to be flung across, 
and the Vistula is a good two hundred yards wide 
here and the river was high. Up ahead the army was 
fighting forward, dependent, for the moment, on what 
came across that bridge. A train arrives, hundreds of 
tons of freight which normally would roll across the 

290 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

river in a few puffs of a cigarette. The cars must be 
opened, each box and sack taken out by hand, carried 
down a bank, loaded into a wagon; the wagons creep 
over the pontoons, struggle through the sand on the 
other side, then each piece must be unloaded and put 
on a train again. 

An axle breaks, the returning line waits an hour for 
the other to cross, a sixty-foot pine log for the new 
railway bridge wedges fast in turning a corner and 
stops everything — you must imagine them at it all 
day, sweating and swearing in all the dialects of the 
dual monarchy — all night, with fagged horses and 
drivers dazed with sleep, in the blaze of a search-light 
reaching out over the river. 

Meanwhile a tall timber railroad bridge was creep- 
ing across. There was no pile-driver engine, and at 
each cluster of piles fifteen or twenty Russian prison- 
ers, in their brown service uniforms, hung to as many 
ropes — "Heave . . . whack! Heave . . . whack V 1 — in 
quaint retribution for what a few sticks of dynamite 
had done a fortnight before. 

A thousand fresh Hungarian troops had just come 
in next morning, and were waiting for their coffee, 
when the word came by field-telephone that a Russian 
flier was dropping bombs about twenty kilometres 
away. It was fine hunting-ground — men, horses, 
stores, and the new bridge — but he sailed away, and 
we drove a dozen miles up the Vistula to New Alex- 
andria, burned during the enveloping movement on 
Ivangorod. 

291 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

All along the way were trenches, telltale yellow lines 
of sand winding among the pines, gun positions, barbed 
wire, and every now and then a big plane-tree, with 
ladders running up to an artillery observation plat- 
form. I climbed up one of them on cleats worn by 
Russian boots for a look at the Vistula and the string 
of Red Cross barges, filled with wounded, going up the 
river. The children hereabout, at any rate, will revere 
the Russians, for their pioneers had carried that wind- 
ing stairway up to the very tip-top of the tree in a 
manner only seen in dreams or picture-books. 

All the farmhouses had been burned, and the peas- 
ants were just returning. We passed several tired 
mothers with babies in shawls hanging from their 
shoulders and little boys trudging behind with some 
rusty kettle or coffee-pot, and once a woman, standing 
in the ruins of her house, of which only the chimney 
was left, calmly cooking her dinner. 

New Alexandria, a pleasant little town, grown up 
round an old chateau, and used as a sort of summer 
resort by Warsaw people, was nothing but blackened 
chimneys and heaps of brick. The Russians had 
burned everything, and the inhabitants, who had fled 
into the pines, were just now beginning to straggle 
back. Some had set up little stands in front of their 
burned houses and were trying to sell apples, plums, 
pears, about the only marketable thing left; some were 
cleaning brick and trying to rebuild, some contented 
themselves with roofing over their cellars. And while 
we were observing these domestic scenes, the army, 

292 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

which had taken the outer forts by assault the preced- 
ing night, was marching into burning Brest-Lit ovsk. 

It was another day before the motors came and we 
could get under way and whirl through such a cross- 
section of a modern army's life as one could scarcely 
have seen in the west of Europe since the Germans 
first came rolling down on Paris. No suburban war- 
fare this; none of that hideous, burrowing, blowing up, 
methodically squashing out yard after yard of trenches 
and men. This was war in the grand old style — an 
army on the march, literally, down roads smoky with 
dust and sunshine, across bridges their own pioneers 
had built, a river of men and horses, wagons and guns, 
from one hazy blue horizon to another. 

And all these men had come from victory and knew 
they were marching to it. How far they were going 
none could tell, but the gods were with them — so 
might the Grand Army have looked when it started 
eastward a hundred years ago. Men and horses had 
been pouring down that road for weeks — on each side 
of the macadam highway the level, unfenced fields 
were trampled flat. It was fully one hundred and 
twenty miles, as the motor road ran, to Brest-Litovsk, 
and there was scarce a moment when, if we were not 
in the thick of them, we were not at least in sight of 
wagons, motors, horses, and men. And, of course, 
this was but the rear of the army; the fighting men 
proper were up in front. The dust hung like fog in 
the autumn sunshine. Drivers were black with it; in 
the distance, on parallel roads, it climbed high in the 

293 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

still air like smoke from burning villages. And out 
of this dust, as we whizzed on, our soldier chauffeur, 
whistle in mouth, shrieking for room, appeared pon- 
toon trains — big steel scows on top, beams under- 
neath, cut, numbered, and ready to put together; 
trains of light farm wagons, wide at the top, slanting 
toward the middle, commandeered from all over Aus- 
tria-Hungary at the beginning of the war and driven, 
some by soldiers, but oftener by civilians with the 
yellow Austrian bands on their arms; heavy ammuni- 
tion wagons drawn by four horses, with a soldier out- 
rider astride one of the leaders, and from time to time 
columns of reserves, older men for the most part, 
bound for guard duty, probably, shuffling along in 
loose order. Round and through these wagon-trains, 
in a swirl of dust, rumbled and swayed big motor- 
trucks, and once or twice, scattering everything with a 
lilting "Ta-te/ . . . Ta-ta/" the gray motor, the flash 
of scarlet, pale blue, and gold, and the bronzed, begog- 
gled, imperial visage of some one high in command. 

Once we passed a big Austrian mortar, covered with 
tarpaulin, by the side of the road, and again two big 
20-centimetre guns, which had not had time to get 
up to Brest-Li bo vsk. This is where you find the heavy 
artillery nowadays, quite as likely as in a fort, on some 
hard highway, where it can easily be moved and 
sheltered, not behind concrete, but some innocent- 
looking apple-tree. Each fence corner was chalked 
with letters and numbers intelligible to the drivers, 
who passed that way; each bridge, down to the few 

294 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

boards across a ditch, had been examined by the 
pioneers, rebuilt if necessary, and a neat little sign 
set up on it, telling whether or not the heavy artillery 
could safely cross. Flowing back toward this huge, 
confident, onrushing organism, the peasants — timid, 
halting, weary, and dust-covered, with wagons heaped 
with furniture, beds, hay for the horses, with the littlest 
children and those too old to walk — were returning 
to the charred ruins of their homes. They, too — like 
the grass — had their unconquerable strength. 

The same patience and quiet courage which had 
struck me in Antwerp as peculiarly Belgian, was here 
again in these Poles, Slovaks, and Ruthenians, whose 
boys, perhaps, were fighting with the armies which 
had driven the Belgians out. You would see peasant 
mothers with their children hanging from their shoul- 
ders — women who had been tramping for days, per- 
haps, and might have days yet to tramp before they 
reached the heap of charred bricks that had once been 
a home. Nearly all had a cow, sometimes pulling back 
on its halter and filling the air with lamentation, some- 
times harnessed with the horse to the family wagon. 
They had their pet dogs and birds, the little girls their 
kittens; from the front of one wagon poked the foolish 
head of a colt. Babies scarcely big enough to sit up 
crammed their little fingers into their eyes to shut out 
the dust; bigger children, to whom the ride would be, 
no doubt, the event of their lives, laughed and clapped 
their hands, and old men on foot took off their caps, 
after the fashion of the country, and bowed gravely 

295 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

as we whirled past. It seemed as if it were we who 
should do the saluting. 

From the fields^ as we whirled into and out of layers 
of air, sharply, as one does in a motor, came now the 
odor of ripe straw, now a whiff of coffee from a " gou- 
lash cannon," steaming away behind its troop like the 
calliope in the old-fashioned circus, and now and then, 
from some thicket or across a clover field, the sharp, 
dismaying smell of rotting flesh. The countryside lay 
so tranquil under the August sun that it was only 
when one saw a dead animal lying in an open field 
that one recalled the fire that, a few days before, must 
have crisscrossed this whole country, as now, doubtless, 
in constant cavalry fights and rear-guard skirmishes, it 
was crisscrossing the country up ahead. 

Half an hour short of Brest-Litovsk an unfinished 
bridge turned us off into a potato field. The soft 
ground had long since been pounded flat, as the army, 
swinging round to the north, had crossed on a pon- 
toon a mile or two lower down. The motor plunged, 
snarled, and stopped, and again, as we shovelled in 
front and pushed behind, we knew why armies burn 
bridges behind them. 

Past us, as we sweated there, the slow but surer 
wagon-trains ploughed forward. One, a German train, 
stopped beside us to bait their horses — officers of the 
landwehr or landsturm type, who looked as if they 
might be, as doubtless they were, lawyers, professors, 
or successful business men at home. They were from 
a class who, with us, would generally be helpless in 

296 






THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

the field, yet these bronzed, bearded, thoughtful- 
looking men seemed just as familiar with the details 
of their present job as with the work they had left 
behind. 

Ever since w T e had crossed into Poland this sober, 
steel-gray stream had been mingling with and stiffen- 
ing our lighter-hearted, more boyish, blue-gray stream 
of Austrians and Hungarians. Here were men who 
knew what they were doing, believed in it, and had 
the will to put it through. One thought of Emerson's 
" Earnest of the North Wind" whenever they came in 
sight. 

Those who talk of "f rightfulness" and get their 
notions of German soldiers from the vaporings of 
sedentary publicists, who know no more of them than 
may be seen through the pipe smoke of their own 
editorial rooms, are destined to a melancholy awaken- 
ing. You may prefer your own ways, but you can- 
not make them prevail by blackguarding the other 
man's weaknesses; you must beat him where he is 
strong. 

Lies and the snobbish ridicule with which our maga- 
zines and papers have been full, run off men like these 
like water off a duck. These men are in earnest. 
They have work to do. No one who has heard them 
singing the "Wacht am Rhein" through the starlight 
of garrisoned towns all the way from the Channel to 
the Carpathians, will talk of their being " stolid"; but 
they have, it is true, no coltishness. They are grown 
up. And this discipline of theirs does not mean, as 

297 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

so many people seem to think it does, being compelled 
to do what you don't want to do. It means doing 
what you are told to do as well as it possibly can be 
done, no matter how small it is nor who is looking on 
— a sense of duty which makes every switchman be- 
hind the lines act as if he were Von Hindenburg. The 
thing of theirs, this will-power and moral earnestness, 
is one of the things that last — something before which 
the merely frivolous has always gone down and always 
will. 

The road down which we were going was, in a gen- 
eral way, the path already taken by the Austrian and 
Hungarian troops which had stormed the outer works 
at Kobilany two days before and been the first to 
enter the town. What happened was much like what 
had happened at Ivangorod. A German corps crossed 
the Bug to north and south and closed in on the rail- 
road, the Sixth Austro-Hungarian Corps under Corps 
General of Infantry Arz attacked the centre. The 
Russians sent the entire civil population eastward, 
removed their artillery and everything of value they 
could take, and set fire to the city. There was a brief 
artillery preparation to which the Russians, who all 
through this retreat appeared to be short in ammuni- 
tion and artillery, replied for a time; then the outer 
forts were stormed, and when the Sixth Corps entered 
the burning city the Russians, except for the rear- 
guard prisoners, were gone. 

We swung past a freight yard littered with over- 
turned cars, through a tangle of wagons — army wagons 

298 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

pushing one way and distracted peasants the other — 
over a pontoon across the narrow Bug and on into the 
town. 

A city of sixty-five thousand people, with the excep- 
tion of a church or two and houses that could almost 
be counted on one's fingers, was a waste of gaping win- 
dows and blackened chimneys. The Russians' pur- 
pose was not altogether clear, for the town was their 
town, and its destruction at this time of the year could 
not seriously embarrass a well-provisioned, confident 
enemy, but they had, at any rate, wiped it off the map. 

Not a woman, a child, a glimmer of peaceful life; 
only smouldering ruins, the occasional abandoned rifles 
and cartridge-boxes of the army that had retired, and 
the endless wagon-trains of the army pursuing them. 

All the dust through which we had ridden since 
morning seemed to have gathered over that dismal 
wreck. It was a fog in the streets, on which darkness 
was already settling — streets without a lamp or a 
sound except that from the onflowing trains. 

Through this dust we tried to find the headquarters 
of the Sixth Army Corps. To its commander our 
passes took us and without him we had no reason for 
being in Brest-Litovsk. Nobody knew where the 
Sixth was. Two Hungarian officers, hurrying by in a 
commandeered carriage, shouted back something about 
the " church with a blue cupola"; somebody else said 
"near the schnapps factory"; a beaming young lieu- 
tenant, helping to disentangle wagon-trains at the 
main street corners, said that the Sixth had marched 

299 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

at three that morning. We had driven all day with 
nothing to eat but a bit of war bread and chocolate, 
we were black with dust, there was not a crumb in 
the place that did not belong to the army, and we sat 
there in the thickening dusk, almost as much adrift 
as a raft in mid-ocean, 

The two armies — wagon-trains, that is to say — 
were crossing each other at that corner. The Germans 
were going one way, the Austro-Hungarians the other — 
tired, dust-covered horses and men, anonymous cogs 
in the vast machine, which had been following the man 
ahead since the day before, like enough, and might go 
on into another day before they could make camp. 

Young Hungarian officers greeted one another gayly, 
and exchanged the day's adventures and news; young 
Germans rode by, slim, serious, and self-contained. 
Now the stream would stop as one line tried to break 
through the other, puzzled drivers would yank their 
horses back, then some determined section commander 
would come charging back, fling his horse into the 
tangle — wagon tongues jammed into the canopy in 
front, protestations in German, Hungarian, Polish, 
Slovak, goodness knows what, until at last one line 
gave way and the other shot forward through the dust 
again. 

I had been in another captured city, with the be- 
sieged then, and when I think of Antwerp it is of the 
creepy, bright stillness during the bombardment — the 
autumn sun, the smell of dead leaves, the shuttered 
streets, without a sound except when a shell came 

300 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

screaming in from the country or, a block or so away, 
there was a detonation and some facade came rum- 
bling down. But when I think of Brest-Litovsk it will 
be of dust — dust like fog and thickened with the smoke 
and twilight — and that strange, wild, creaking stream 
of wagons fighting through it as they might have 
fought in the days when Europe was young and whole 
races of men came pouring over the frontiers. 

We started off finally on foot through streets silent 
as the grave — not a person, not a lamp, not so much 
as a barking dog, as queer and as creepy as some made- 
up thing in a theatre. Once we stumbled past a 
naked and dismembered trunk set up beside a doorway 
— a physician's manikin that chance or some sinister 
clown had left there. Once — and one of the strangest 
sounds I ever heard — behind the closed up-stair shut- 
ters of an apothecary's shop, whose powders and 
poisons were strewn over the sidewalk, a piano halt- 
ingly played with one finger. 

At last a light, an open door, a sentry — and this 
was, indeed, theatrical — a lighted room and a long 
table set with candles, flowers, and wine. The com- 
mander of the Sixth Corps had just been decorated 
with the order "Pour le merite" and he and his officers 
were dining before taking up the march. He wel- 
comed us in the true Hungarian style, grabbed me by 
the arms and asked if I was hungry, apologized for 
their frugal war-time fare, told how splendidly his 
men had behaved, had a word and a place for every- 
body, as if we were all old friends. 

301 



ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI 

There were three rooms full of officers, and every 
one half rose and bowed in military fashion as we made 
our way between the tables to our seats at the end of 
the third. An amiable young signal-officer who had 
been at his telephone some thirty kilometres away 
when the city was taken and was off at three next 
morning, sat opposite me and told with great spirit 
how the only common language between him and 
some of his polyglot men was the English he had 
learned in school and they had picked up in America. 

We slept on commandeered mattresses that night on 
the floor of a vacant house, with a few Hungarian hus- 
sars still singing over the victory in the back yard, 
and got up to find the crowded town of the night 
before as empty as the old camp-ground the day after 
the circus. 

We strolled through some of the empty streets and 
into the citadel, where a handful of German soldiers 
were guarding a placid, tan-colored little herd of Rus- 
sian prisoners; recrossed the pontoon bridge, as crowded 
as it had been the afternoon before, and then stopped 
at Kobilany fort on the way back to Ivangorod. 

The brief Austrian fire had been accurate. There 
were shell holes inside the fort, along the parapet, and 
one frightful bull's-eye, which had struck square on 
the inner concrete rim and blown chunks of concrete, 
as well as its own steel, all over the place. The rifle- 
men left in this embrasure were killed at a stroke, and 
their blood remained freshly dried on the stones. Of 
various uncomfortable places I have seen in the war 

302 



THE RUSSIAN RETREAT 

this was one — left behind in an open concrete fort to 
cover the retreat of artillery, and wait with a pop-gun 
rifle until the enemy decided that his artillery had 
"silenced" you and that it was time to storm. 

One outer angle of the fort had been blown up and 
the rest was to have been dynamited, but a nimble 
Pole, fearing that he might be blown up, too, before 
the order came to retire, had, so we were told, cut the 
electric wire. Just why Brest-Litovsk was given up 
must be left for those who have had a more compre- 
hensive view of all the causes behind the Russian 
retreat. It was plain to any one, however, that al- 
though this outer fortress had been taken by storm 
and a certain amount of damage done to the attack- 
ing force by mines laid in front of it, scarcely more 
than nominal resistance, considering the original prep- 
arations, had been made. 

Again we whirled down the Ivangorod road, through 
a stream of wagons and peasants' carts almost as thick 
as the day before. We took a new road this time, 
but the deserted trenches still crossed the fields, and 
creeping up toward them, behind trees, through the 
greasy, black mud of pasture-land, were those eloquent 
little shelters, scarcely more than a basketful of earth, 
thrown up by the skirmishers as they ran forward, 
dropped and dug themselves in. 

We came to Radom and turned southward again. 
There were people, smoke coming from cottage chim- 
neys, goose-girls with their spotless and absurdly peace- 
ful geese, once a group of peasants — young men and 

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barefooted girls — sitting on the grass resting from their 
work in the fields. As the train passed one of the boys 
flung his arm round the neck of the tanned young 
nymph beside him, and over they rolled, fighting like 
good-natured puppies. They were the very peasants 
we had seen dragging through the dust of the Brest- 
Litovsk road and this the same country, though it 
looked so strangely bright and warm and full of people. 
War had blown over it, that was all, and life, which is 
so much stronger than the strongest field-marshal, 
which can be bent, beaten down, and crushed some- 
times, like the grass, was growing back again. 



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